Author Topic: Political Journalists Have Themselves to Blame for Sinking Credibility  (Read 898 times)

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Offline SVPete

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Political Journalists Have Themselves to Blame for Sinking Credibility
David Harsanyi | December 15, 2017
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"Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good," legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there's a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media has botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I'd love to hear about it.

Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations—written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing—turned out to be completely wrong. ...

Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.

If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn't there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?
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The fact that many political journalists (not all) have a political agenda is not new (social media has made this fact inarguable), but if they become a proxy of operatives who peddle falsehoods, they will soon lose credibility with an even bigger swath of the country. They will have themselves to blame.

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Maybe having seen the systematic but more muted MSM partisanship (forget the polite word, "bias," the MSM have been partisan actors and operatives for decades!) of past decades helped me recognize it early, but I spotted the current hysterical Trump-hating 2 years ago. I did something that MSM partisans ASSumed Americans would not do. I compared their accusations concerning racism in Trump's speeches to what he actually said, in the particular speech and across his campaign's messages. The MSM lied.

Given Trump's victory in the face of the MSM's Cat 4 Hurricane of partisan bias, I think alot of Americans went through that same fact-checking exercise. And I'm equally sure I was far from the first to do it. The MSM have ramped their partisan operative hurricane to Cat 5, and are headed off the charts. They may be keeping Trump-haters and partisan ideologues persuaded, but I think the MSM's hysterical partisanship and Hate-Trumping are diminishing MSM credibility viewer by viewer, listener by listener, and reader by reader.

Donald Trump is not a principled conservative. Donald trump is far from being a life-long Republican. So he has not been persona non grata in the social circles in which MSM folk travel and booze. He's heard the partisanship of MSM folk up close and personal. He's seen the futility of - and probably heard MSM folk mock - Republican attempts to appease MSM folk. So he doesn't. Instead, I believe he's been using MSM folks' bias against them, to get "free publicity" and to draw MSM folks' partisanship out into the open for all willing to see it. Not only are MSM folks losing credibility with their partisanship, but they are also playing into Trump's hand (and have been for over 2 years!).
If, as anti-Covid-vaxxers claim, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/robert-f-kennedy-jr-said-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-deadliest-vaccine-ever-made-thats-not-true/ , https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2021/11/23/covid-shots-are-the-deadliest-vaccines-in-medical-history/ , The Vaccine is deadly, where in the US have Pfizer and Moderna hidden the millions of bodies of those who died of "vaccine injury"? Is reality a Big Pharma Shill?

Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.