I’m thrilled CNN is taking this stance. Why party with people that never miss an opportunity to bash you. I’m proud that they finally recognize this. Hope other outlets follow suit.
Sara’s response was tacky. I shouldn’t be surprised but gotta admit I am. This administration is doing their best to destroy free press. I fear they will succeed
No, that would be too subtle for the President.
Of course, if someone else suggests it, he can claim he thought of it first. In fact, no one has ever placed a placard on an empty table before he thought of it.
Didn’t Trump skip the WH Correspondents Dinner this year because…something, something, thin skinned, humorless asshole. No need for any national news organization to do anything but report the facts of what Trump and his cabal and the Republican Congress are doing to the country.
I have nothing but complete disgust for any media outlet who DOES attend said Christmas Party. Stop acting like these are normal times, FFS!
Christmas comes early! Finally, good news from @CNN. https://t.co/3GeJysIol3
— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) November 29, 2017
It's difficult to believe Sanders' soul assessed out in the low six figures. Then again I once offered mine up for a night with the McClosky sisters, so what do I know?No news organization should ever attend a White House Christmas party. They are supposed to be adversarial.
“We will send a White House reporting team to the event and report on it if news warrants.”
If understatement could drip, that line did it for me.
And once again, the situation is juicy. What is going on? That we are not seeing, again. Come on guys, time to get things rolling.
Yep, "The only way a journalist should look at a politician is ‘Down’ "
It actually was based on the best available facts. Which is why the court ruled the way it did. Because you don’t like that your pet theory is not accepted does not make the obverse false. That is the realm of the rightwing nutjobs, and we are supposed to be better than that. Perhaps you could work on doing so.
In todays world do we REALLY think the WH Press Secretary tweeting ’
‘Christmas comes early! Finally, good news from @CNN.’
is a GOOD thing???
The rest of the Sane Press, should stay away too…
would make “XMas at the WH” look like “The Wannsee Conference 2017”
Apparently you don’t understand what’s being said, and you’ve extrapolated what you want it to mean into something you can attack.
First, so that we’re talking about the same thing: Fox News is a network; Fox News is not news coverage, although it does present news coverage (among other things, of course). I think Mr. Marshall probably understands that, and, if he were referring to networks, he would have used that word.
Simply being exposed to reality (news coverage) isn’t what causes people to care about something. They care because they come into the situation already caring about certain things (like fairness or compassion, for instance). If the coverage touches upon those themes, they’ll care. If not, they won’t. (I’m assuming here that their minds are not blank slates, and through their life experiences, etc., they have adopted certain moral outlooks.)
This is different from simple attention, awareness, or exposure. Mr. Marshall is right when he says the information can only be shared: people are exposed to it. How it touches them personally is another matter.
If Fox is your measure as to what is not a news network than there are few remaining broadcast news networks remaining. FOX styles themselves as a new network, a sizable percentage of Americans believe it’s a news network, and the avid viewers believe it’s a news network. They believe what the see on FOX. They don’t really have the desire to look behind what they are seeing to find if it has any basis in reality.
Right wing radio and TV–FOX being a large player–do radically alter views. Do really believe what people do and don’t care about isn’t massively influenced by what they hear and read on the so called news? Look at the history of right wing news media over the last 35 years, or just see: Nazi Germany, subcategory, propaganda.
Good compassionate people can be made to hate. It’s too damn easy to do that by those practiced in that art. The Nazi example is extreme, but all of the contemporary broadcast tv media do it–I feel that FOXNews is the worst, but they all do it to some extent. Peoples minds are shaped and they believe what the see on the networks. Stating that one isn’t news while others are is irrelevant now. If people believe it is true than it become true to them–no matter what the source.
I’m probably repeating myself by now. Moral outlooks can be changed overnight, peoples beliefs can be changed overnight, what they care about can change in a heartbeat. In just the last 20 years we’ve seen that time and time again–the last couple of years it’s been unending. I wish that were not so. I wish people carefully sifted through what the hear and see in the media they view–from Facebook to CNN–and after careful rational thought made decisions about what they just saw. It just doesn’t work that way though. Too many glance at something in passing and assume it’s true–and then modify their worldview accordingly.
As for Josh? He remains one of my favorite voices among so very much noise.
I’d say the media can’t force anyone to think a certain way… but they can definitely present an image of popular outrage, and keep the passive audience marinating in the background noise of their viewpoint. And that’s powerful. That background noise seeps into the subconscious, and repetition of it, day after day after day, reinforces the message. Eventually, the audience doesn’t think about where they first heard something, only that ‘yeah, I thought about that, and now here the media is validating what was in the back of my mind’.
It is literally Goebbels’ playbook, and while Josh is right that the media can’t force people to care about one incident in real-time, they can sure as hell shape the terrain and slowly twist the way people think. For a media outlet to not acknowledge that is either capitulation, or trying to set themselves up to run the same play.
There’s no argument about that. But I’d say as a corollary that the media aren’t capable of or in the business of bringing about particular outcomes as a result of broadcasting a particular piece of information. In a post-truth world, the only question a highly partisan, pretty much tribally divided electorate may ask is who’s the enemy of my enemy. The mainstream media’s efforts to make people aware of Trump’s failings and dangers pretty much backfired. FOX watchers simply dismissed it all. There’s any number of people you could try to have a rational conversation with who’d say “Well, if you believe the mainstream media…” when you put forth various sorts of evidence for your argument. Personally I’m just tired of hearing the media bashed not for things many or most of them did, but for things that would be difficult and not their jobs 30 years ago and are quite simply impossible now. The voters themselves have a role to play, and increasingly they’ve failed to do their jobs. I think it’s naive and unfair to blame the media for that.
What Joseph Goebbels engaged in was a propaganda war, as you say.
And that is exactly what makes it vitally important to clarify what we’re talking about.
For instance, conflating propaganda with reporting of actual news. Propaganda distorts the facts. News reporting presents the facts in an unbiased way. Fox News does, in fact, engage in some reportage, but much more of its content could be described as propaganda. To dismiss every single thing Fox News reports as propaganda makes discussing Fox News in any meaningful way impossible.
Unbiased news reporting (presentation of facts) cannot force someone who didn’t care about something to care about it. Fox News cannot compel someone who loves liberals to hate liberals by reporting the facts; the facts are not controlled by Fox News. However, Fox News can compel someone to hate liberals by engaging in propaganda, which may include a selective editing of facts (but this is not unbiased news reporting. )
You may call this nit-picking, but it’s the central point I was trying to make about Mr. Marshall’s claim, which I believe is true.
Except that it’s always been the media’s job to influence common thought. That’s what Thomas Paine did. It’s what Hearst did. It’s why the Gutenberg Press was so revolutionary: before mass-produced books, ‘the media’ was the church, and gossip-mongers. Now, it’s gossip-mongers with cable shows.
We can tell ourselves an unbiased news media just presents the facts, but the truth is: nobody is unbiased. As journalists, all we can do is present our biases openly, so people can understand the viewpoint that inevitably provides a subconscious lens (at the very least) through which the story is presented. But make no mistake: we’re storytellers. That’s why a news piece is a ‘story’. Journos tell the story of what’s happened, and what’s happening. That’s where the puissance of the news lies. It’s where it’s always lain. When all we do is recite facts and statistics, bereft of context and narrative, nobody listens. Nobody ever has.
Have the voters failed to do their jobs? Yep. Totally agree. But those two jobs are inter-related, and they’re not the only ones.
All I know is that sometime this morning I agreed with Josh that the media don’t simply select whatever outcomes they prefer, they aren’t the only segment of society that influences how things turn out, and if you didn’t get the political outcome you wanted it’s not necessarily the media’s sole fault. That’s really all I ever wanted to say.
Randolph Hearst is one of the worst examples you could use. Gutenberg’s invention most importantly allowed for the creation of mass-produced printed materials, which could ultimately say anything. In Hearst’s case the goal was to influence common thought. For Gutenberg, it wasn’t necessarily. Influencing common thought may be a by-product of the attempt to present an accurate picture of reality, but in good reporting, it’s not the goal (the job).
It is also factually untrue that no one listens to facts and statistics. The most immediate example I can think of is the Vietnam War, when the administration and the military used facts and figures (usually not accurate ones) to justify their efforts and demonstrate that the US was winning the war. These figures were quoted, rejected, challenged, etc.
When a war reporter talks about a “massive barrage,” for instance, he/she is using the subjective term “massive” (and also “barrage,” but to a lesser degree). He/she is not aware of the exact amount of firepower released in the barrage; but he/she tries to best represent the actuality of what happened.
But back to my point: That “massive barrage” will mean different things to different people. To some it will mean “How horrible!” To others it will mean “USA! USA! USA!” To some, both. To others, neither.
Why does it mean different things to different people? Because the reporter told them it was horrible? Because the reporter told them it was kick-ass? Of course not.