If they’re complaining, you’ve hit a soft spot
As Digby noted yesterday, “the media has now found some integrity just in time to help [Trump], even as their previous irresponsibility also helped him.” That is, by burying Trump documents Iranian hackers recently hacked.
“Working the refs” is the phrase long used to describe how conservatives cowed journalists into treating the right’s lunacy as normal politics when its sabotage of democracy was still in previews. Both-sidesism is one approach press stenographers use to prove they have no liberal bias (for fear of being called bad names by the right and to preserve access to Republicans inside the Beltway).
Oh, but criticism is starting to bite. Access reporters cowed by the right object to being criticized by the left.
Sensitive, aren’t we?
Access journalism, press stenography, and bothsidesism has undermined faith in what you do, not criticism from the left. Press consolidation under private equity and hedge funds has not helped one bit:
Brooke Gladstone: In recent years, billionaire owners have snapped up outlets like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and others, with three of the top newspaper chains in the country are currently owned not by individuals or families but by private investment firms. According to Margot Susca, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Accountability, and Democracy at American University, we’re currently in the private investment era of media.
Private equity firms and hedge funds may function differently in the marketplace but Susca says they have a similarly ravenous approach to buying up news outlets and selling them off for parts. Susca, author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy, debunks the notion that it was solely the dawn of the internet that failed local news.
James Fallows follows up on Froomkin’s comment on FKA twitter:
Obviously I disagree w main points here: that press has overall done very good job covering Trump, and that there is a left-wing “industry” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” especially NYT.
But (seriously, no snark) credit to at least one prominent NYT figure for acknowledging that there is a critique.
Next step would be engagement on some specifics people have actually been asking about:
– Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot
– Why no retrospective public discussion, at all, about coverage in 2016 (Her emails!!!!) and lessons thereof. After Iraq WMD coverage, NYT under Bill Keller did a public retrospective (“what we got wrong”) etc
– Why no public explanation of diff between coverage of HRC/Podesta Russian-hacked emails and silence on Trump Iranian-hacked emails
– Why diff between extent / persistence of Biden “fitness to govern” cognitive overage vs Trump-cognitive issues.
– Thoughts about proportion of “guy in a diner” stories, vs “women in the suburbs” stories. And proportion of “econ is good but feels bad” stories.
– Whether there’s a diff in general outlook of coverage of US politics (need for “balance”) vs coverage of the rest of the range of news. And so onWorth considering this as a start.
It’s all so tiresome.