All true, but by the same token, there is reporting and there is reporting. There is good reporting and bad reporting. And, there are weak stories and strong stories. An article referencing that an "advisor to the President" said X, which disclosure would be a significant breach in ethics for an adviser to the President to engage in, without corroboration of any kind, is particularly thin. It is a bedrock part of journalistic ethics to be accurate and to corroborate, and when reporting something that cannot be corroborated, the article should state so explicitly.Brian Peacock wrote:Spectacularly missing the point. Reports report. They're not dealing in absolute copper-bottomed truths here but in what people are saying about issues and events, about the circumstances, and the context of the events, about the what-where-when-and-whos, about the possible whys, about the possible implications in light of past events and the ramifications for future events, etc. This is all non-controversial, bread and butter journalistic stuff in-and-of itself.Forty Two wrote:There isn't this great swathe of investigation, reporting, comment and analysis that proves the points being made.Brian Peacock wrote:
Reporters report. This is common knowledge. Expecting the reports of reporters to adhere to legal or scientific standards of proof and evidence or, presumably, just shut the fuck up not only ignores the issues being reported but disavows great swathes of legitimate media investigation, reporting, speculation, comment, and analysis.
Further, the fact that reporters rely on unnamed sources does not imbue their reports with trustworthiness. If a story leaves questions open and unanswered, and is very short on detail, as this one was, then I think withholding judgment is justified. Cool story, bro. But, which adviser to the President was breaching their ethical duty to keep the President's confidences such that the President can obtain advice on various issues without everything being downloaded to a journalist? What exactly happened? What's the President's position? Does he deny writing it? Was he asked?
Because the article does not explain how the information was corroborated.Brian Peacock wrote:And what makes you think that these anonymous reports have not been corroborated?I get that reporters report, and they even use anonymous sources in order to get their stories. However, there was a time, like during Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein had journalistic ethics, and they needed to have their anonymous sources corroborated before they could use their statements.
Yes, that much is obvious. We have seen a lot of uncorroborated made up shit coming out of the media.Brian Peacock wrote: Indeed, given the viper's nest that is the US litigation system I would imagine corroboration is among a media outlet's highest priorities, a legal necessity in fact, and not just a matter of the personal ethics of individual journalists. I mean, if media outlets weren't concerned about things like fact-checking and corroboration then, well, they could just make up any old shit couldn't they? Are you suggesting that this is what is going on here - that these outlets are dealing in uncorroborated made-up-shit?
CNN - reported "Hands Up Don't Shoot" even after it was known that Michael Brown did not have his hands up or say don't shoot, but rather was attacking a police officer. The Washington Post factchecked it, and the Obama justice department ruled that Brown was charging the police officer when shot.
CNN- reported Cherille Williams was "calling for Peace" when she was calling for people to go to white neighborhoods and burn them down, instead of burning down black neighborhoods. They carefully edited the video.
CNN's Chris Cuomo reported that it was illegal for citizens to read wikileaks disclosures, but that it was illegal for reporters at CNN to do so, and all the information that we learn about them should come from CNN.
CNN falsely reported that rape was a preexisting condition under the Republican ACHA.
CNN reported on June 6th that Comey was going to contradict President Trump’s claim that he wasn’t under FBI investigation in his Senate testimony, a report which obviously was going to make Trump look like a liar. The article, originally titled, “Comey expected to refute Trump,” featured in its byline Jake Tapper, Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, and Brian Rokus. Of course, this isn’t what Comey said in the Senate. Instead, Comey did not dispute Trump’s claims that he told the president that he was not under FBI investigation.
My experience watching CNN, MSNBC and other news outlets, which constantly publish reports that slam the President, and in virtually every case there is no hard evidence given for the claims. The articles have very little to go on and are worded in ways that appear to make grand claims without basis recounted in the article.Brian Peacock wrote:How many, and how many is too many? On what are you basing this claim?There was thought put into it, and a story did not get published on one anonymous source which did not provide back-up or was not otherwise corroborated. Today, there are too many examples of reporters just getting it wrong, and publishing flimsy stories.
I saw MSNBC try to paint a demonstration as racist white gun-toters - while doctoring a video of black man in the demonstration carrying a gun, and presenting the news as if the guy was white. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/busted-msnb ... n-footage/
http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/23/13- ... residency/January 22: The Trump-Comey Bromance
On January 22, shortly after President Trump took office, author Richard Hine tweeted out a short video that he claimed showed Trump “literally [blowing] a kiss to James Comey at a WH reception for law enforcement.” Hine’s tweet was retweeted nearly 10,000 times. The media, naturally, glommed into it.
Among the media boosters of this story: ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum (retweeted nearly 1,600 times), The New Republic’s Jeet Heer (657 retweets), the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten, the New Yorker’s Ben Taub, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, GQ’s Keith Olbermann (retweeted nearly 1,100 times), ThinkProgress’s Ian Millhiser, and many others. The news outlets that ran with this story, meanwhile, included HuffPost, Raw Story, The Week and others.
Unfortunately for all of the credulous media figures who took this story to press (or to tweet), it wasn’t true: audio of the exchange clearly shows Trump is not blowing a kiss to Comey, but rather saying his name. But a good, juicy fake news story is hard to quash: months after this fake news died down, the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson reported on it as if it were credible.
Fake news -
More fake news:On February 17, Garance Burke at the Associated Press published a bombshell report that claimed “the Trump administration considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border.” The AP story was shared 43,000 times on Facebook. The Boston Globe ran the story; so did CBS and the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and Slate and Vice and countless smaller outlets. Social media went nuts.
One big problem, however: NPR and Reuters got their dates mixed up. The Kuwaiti celebration had actually been held the Wednesday prior to Trump’s visit. Most of these erroneous tweets were subsequently deleted as the mistake became clear, though Cox left hers up and simply issued a correction (her original tweet received 1,200 retweets; her correction received a grand total of ten).
More fake news:On February 25, NPR and Reuters reported that Kuwait’s ambassador was holding his annual National Day celebration at Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, an event that could have cost him upwards of $60,000. Trump was spotted at the same hotel, leading many in the media to believe he was there as part of some pay-for-play scheme with the Kuwaiti government.
Many in the media jumped on board this story and began circulating it widely. ThinkProgress’s Legum put out a series of tweets about the alleged scandal; these tweets were collectively retweeted thousands and thousands of times. Phillip Rucker, the Washington Post’s White House bureau chief, tweeted about it. New York Times and MTV writer Ana Marie Cox tweeted about it, and so did HuffPost’s Sam Stein tweeted it, as well.
More fake news:On May 3, Vox’s German Lopez published a piece claiming that “the US Department of Justice is literally prosecuting a woman for laughing at Jeff Sessions.” It will not surprise you to know that this story went insanely viral: it was shared nearly 106,000 times on Facebook. A few days later at Vox, Lizz Winstead wrote that the woman was “arrested for the crime of laughing…during the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions” (this netted an additional 20,000 Facebook shares).
A Mother Jones headline blared: “Woman Convicted After Laughing During Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing” (43,000 shares). Vanity Fair: “A jury just convicted a woman for laughing at Jeff Sessions” (40,000 shares). HuffPost: “A woman is on trial for laughing during a congressional hearing” (13,000 shares). NBC News: “Activist faces jail time for laughing during Sessions hearing” (13,000 shares). The New York Times: “A code pink protestor laughs over a Trump nominee and is convicted” (34,000 shares).
It once again took Adams at the Washington Examiner to throw some water on this hysterical fire. The foreman of the jury that convicted the woman pointed out that the woman “did not get convicted for laughing. It was her actions as she was being asked to leave. [The woman’s] comments as she was being escorted out caused the session to stop. It disrupted the session.” Indeed, the protestor herself, Desiree Fairooz, wrote an article for Vox in which she pointed out that other people had laughed at the hearing yet hadn’t been arrested—a strong indication that Fairooz’s crime was disruptive behavior, not simply “laughing.”
The media, propelled by sensational gender politics and profound paranoia about Sessions, could not be bothered to write up a nuanced or detailed take on this issue. Indeed, you can see this slyly dishonest tendency at Snopes.com: writer David Emery rated as “true” the claim that Fairooz “was prosecuted for disorderly conduct after she laughed” during the hearing. This is technically accurate, but deliberately and cleverly misleading—in other words, a normal media trick in the Age of Trump.
On May 4, shortly after the American Health Care Act passed the House of Representatives, “lady reporter” Alexandra Jaffe tweeted that she had seen “cases upon cases of beer…rolled into the capitol on a cart covered in a sheet.” From this dubious tweet about an unverified beerfest, retweeted over 3,400 times, all hell broke loose.
Sally Kohn, seemingly rhetorically, asked if the beers were there “to celebrate the millions of Americans who will be hurt by [the GOP’s] new legislation?!?!?!?” The Center for American Progress-Action’s Igor Volsky, incredulous and flabbergasted, demanded: “THESE FRAT BOYS ARE GONNA F-CKING PARTY AFTER STRIPPING 24 MILLION OF INSURANCE?!?!” (Volksy’s tweet was shared more than 2,100 times.)
The feminist website Jezebel wrote that Republicans “[drank] beer” in the wake of the AHCA’s passage. “Republicans celebrated taking away Americans’ health insurance with cases of beer,” blared a headline at Mic. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called the news about the beer party “deplorable.” At RawStory, Brad Reed wrote that Republicans “plan massive beer bash as they take healthcare away from women, the disabled and the poor.” Yahoo’s Dan Devine was scandalized by the news. The Daily Dot reported that Republicans were ordering “cases upon cases of beer” to celebrate. Stephen Colbert condemned the GOP’s “beer bash.” Because they allegedly drank beer after the AHCA passage, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald said that “it should be [the GOP’s] loved ones who die.”
All of this righteous anger might have been well-placed—if the beer bash had actually happened. As it turned out, the man who had wheeled the beers into the Capitol explicitly told Jaffe that the drinks were not for the GOP conference.
A fantasy story, flatly contradicted by the testimony of a knowledgeable witness, nevertheless sent media types into gales of howling outrage. Nobody bothered to fact-check the reports or even wait to see how the story developed. They just rolled with the anger, humiliating and debasing themselves in the process.
Exactly, who indeed? That's why I don't believe a thin story based on an alleged "Adviser to the President" who apparently disclosed that the President ignored the advisors' advice and helped write or dictated a communication about his son's meeting. An adviser to the President, absolutely, has a duty to advise the president, and keep confidences, and he's not to disclose to the media what questions the President is asking about and what advice is taken or not taken. What if it's about North Korea? President asks for advice about what to do with nukes in North Korea, and specifically asks for advice on military options. An "advisor" reports to the press that the president is contemplating military action against North Korea. WaPo reports it as such, and provides no corroboration and the details are scant. What do we do with that story? Wouldn't you question why an "adviser" - if indeed the source is one - is reporting the details of what advice was sought?Brian Peacock wrote:Yes, media outlets are bombarded with press releases and phone calls, emails, and personal representations from 'interested parties' all the time, each trying to 'spin' this-or-that issue for that-or-this purpose and effect. Sometimes the the journalists find the news, and sometime the news finds journalists. This is not a new thing. But such complaints are also a red herring, because as I noted before, in moving the discussion onto an examination of the probity of US journalism and ethics of journalists in general the actual issue being reported has been conveniently pushed to the side.Political players have relationships with journalists to get them stories. A political player will call the journalist, who needs to get good scoops to advance their career, and hand them a story. Both political parties do this, and they distribute talking points, and press releases to direct the press what to report (not every single thing they report, but a good amount of what they report). That's why you'll see shifts in reporting - and it will cut across all the news shows, and they will all start saying iterations of the same thing.
I find myself wondering which media organisations and outlets are forwarding these apparent 'concerns' about the apparent parlous state of journalistic practice among the US's serious 'papers of record' like the Post and the NYT in response to this story (a story, let's not forget, where significant political players party to the actual proceeding reported on have already been caught out peddling untruths as facts, attempting to shift responsibility onto others, and creating distractions to monopolise air time an column inches), and where and by what means they are getting the information which forms and frames their coverage.
Who are the spinners and who are the spun?
It's a report based on an uncorroborated, anonymous source, described only as an "advisor" to the President of the United States and discloses the nature of advice given/sought and what the President did and didn't do (ignoring the advice of the advisors). Yes, a major pinch of salt is needed.Brian Peacock wrote:You don't have to automatically trust a story based oon an anonymous sources, but you don't have to automatically distrust it either. It is what it is - a report. One always takes a report from an anonymous source or 'an insider' or 'a close colleague who asked not to be named' etc with a pinch of salt - such reports essentially create a conditional situation don't they; if-so-then-what-and-if-not-then-so-what(?)?I simply do not trust uncorroborated stories based only on anonymous sources. I don't care if they're about democrats or republicans. Find some corroboration you can publish, or it's value is just what it is - some reporter (who is generally not someone worthy of particular deference) says they talked to someone who is anonymous and that anonymous person said something bad, probably about a person he's trying to undermine. I'm not giving that much weight at all. It's "cool story, bro."
If so, then what? Oh, well, if so, then someone is in major trouble for breaching their duty of confidentiality in their role as an adviser to the President. If the President gets, say, legal advice, on an issue of international law, when they speak frankly he might say, what is the legality of using nuclear weapons? Or, what is the legality of using white phosphorous? He may not be seriously considering these weapons, but he wants to know the parameters of his legal position domestically and internationally. You wouldn't have a legal adviser going out and anonymously talking to a journalist disclosing what the President was advised and how he ignored the advice. Sometimes a decision maker takes advice, and sometimes he listens to another advisor that has different advice, or sometimes he goes his own way. Advisers aren't the President. They advise.
Brian Peacock wrote:
But are you raising 'concerns' here because people are actually taking these reports without salt (in which case what people, how many, and on what basis have you formed this view?) or, again, are you latching onto the idea that people are generally too credulous about what they read in print or hear on the TV or radio news, along with the fresh idea of news 'bandwagoning', as a way to avoid contemplation and discussion of some rather uncomfortable possibilities.
My view is that the author of the article does not give us "what people, how many and on what basis" he formed his view as reported in the article, and based on what he did provide - disclosing that the source was actually an advisor to the President, I find the fact of the disclosure and its likely accuracy to be suspect.
I am positive that plenty of people want to believe whatever is printed about Trump, just as plenty of people wanted to believe whatever was printed about Obama. This kind of bandwagoning resulted in there being a lot of people buying into reports of Obama being born somewhere other than Hawaii, for example. The difference is, if it was a question of Trump's birth, CNN and MSNBC et al would say that if there is smoke there must be fire, and these are serious allegations to be taken seriously....
