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real-human
Joined: 02 Jul 2011
Posts: 14951
Location: on earth
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 Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:12 pm Post subject: |
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| isobars wrote: | | From the WSJ, Aug 18, with permission: |
oohhh boy ultra partisan sexual assault predator lover Ruppy mucdoch trash journalism. That trust fund baby who owns more media in the USA including this trash paper with the largest circulation of all media,
so iso is the media still liberal?
Here is a timely article by a former Fux news nazi. And he admits it, can you?
nyt
On Politics: A former Fox News insider spills the beans
| Quote: | Today’s newsletter is a guest contribution by Jeremy W. Peters, who writes for The Times’s media desk. He got his hands on a forthcoming book by Chris Stirewalt, a former senior journalist at Fox News, and shares its highlights here.
After a decade at Fox News, Chris Stirewalt was suddenly shown the door in January 2021, becoming a casualty of restructuring — or, at least, that was how Fox described his and other layoffs that swept out longtime journalists who were part of the network’s news division.
Stirewalt, who was part of the team at Fox News that projects election results and who testified before the House Jan. 6 committee this summer, suspects there was a bigger reason behind his firing, which he explains in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” to be released next week.
“I got canned after very vocal and very online viewers — including the then-president of the United States — became furious when our Decision Desk was the first to project that Joe Biden would win the former G.O.P. stronghold of Arizona in 2020,” Stirewalt writes.
Coming at 11:20 p.m., well before the other networks declared that Biden would win the state, the Fox call was extremely controversial and consequential. It infuriated Donald Trump and threw a wrench into his attempt to falsely declare himself the winner of the 2020 election. He ordered his campaign aides to demand that Fox retract the call, to no avail.
Despite the pressure to reverse its decision, and the ratings crash Fox suffered in the next few weeks after Trump urged people to watch other networks, the network didn’t buckle because the Decision Desk analysts insisted that the data backed up their projections. And they were right.
A spokeswoman for Fox News said only, “Chris Stirewalt’s quest for relevance knows no bounds,” but did not dispute any specific points he makes.
Green beans and ice cream
Stirewalt’s book is an often candid reflection on the state of political journalism and his time at Fox News, where such post-mortem assessments are not common — either because of the strict confidentiality agreements in place for employees, or the loyalty that some network insiders continue to feel even after they’ve left.
In Stirewalt’s view, the network has played a leading role in the coarsening of American democracy and the radicalization of the right. At one point in the book, he accuses Fox of inciting “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.”
He describes how, over his 11 years at the network, he witnessed Fox feeding its viewers more and more of what they wanted to hear, and little else. This kind of affirming coverage got worse during the years that Trump was president, he says, and turbocharged the reaction of Trump supporters once Fox called Arizona for Biden.
“Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations,” he writes. “Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
He describes the “rage” directed at him and the rest of the Decision Desk team, writing, “Amid the geyser of anger in the wake of the Arizona call, Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, called for my firing and accused me of a ‘cover-up.’”
He goes on, “Covering up what, exactly? We didn’t have any ballots to count and we didn’t have any electoral votes to award.”
Supporters of Donald Trump outside the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix shortly after the 2020 election.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Stirewalt also writes: “Had viewers been given a more accurate understanding of the race over time, Trump’s loss would have been seen as a likely outcome. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the shocking upset that it was, viewers were told to assume that polls don’t apply (unless they were good for Trump) and that forecasters like me were going to be wrong again.”
Stirewalt names names, taking particular aim at Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox’s highest-rated prime time show and a frequent fanner of flames in the nation’s cultural battles. He paints Carlson and Fox management as hypocrites who claim to be standing up against big corporate media despite being part of a gigantic corporate media enterprise.
“Carlson is rich and famous,” Stirewalt writes. “Yet he regularly rails about the ‘big, legacy media outlets.’ Guests denounce the ‘corporate media’ on his show and Fox’s C.E.O. calls Carlson ‘brave’ for discussing controversial topics. Yet somehow, nobody even giggles.”
He adds, “It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”
What Fox wants
Stirewalt also offers a counterintuitive take on what Fox News ultimately wants to achieve by offering content that tilts hard to the right. It’s not to elect Republicans or really even to help them at all, he says.
Rather, it’s about making money.
Hosts like Sean Hannity and analysts like Dick Morris, the former Clinton aide who became a fixture on Fox, for years propagated falsehoods to their audiences about how well Republicans were positioned to win their races, apparently aiming to juice the network’s ratings, Stirewalt writes.
“They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win,” he says, “but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the G.O.P. chances. It was good for them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.”
He adds, “Despite all that Fox’s detractors said about the network being a mouthpiece for the Republican Party, the two organizations had fundamentally different aims.”
Stirewalt briefly reflects on what his role in all of this might have been, now that he’s been gone for a year and a half. He is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Bulwark, a publication that has become a locus of anti-Trump energy among disaffected Republicans.
“I make no pretense that I have always been on the side of the angels,” he writes. “But I have definitely paid my dues.” |
_________________
when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard. |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5181
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2022 9:01 pm Post subject: |
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| coboardhead wrote: | | We are now in the phase of this infection where it has become more of a "health concern" where we have protocols, vaccines and treatments that greatly reduce the capacity of the infection to go into the same sort of uncontrollable growth that the initial infection underwent. To this portion of the infection I give Biden a better grade. Vaccines are AVAILABLE to anyone that wants them. Treatments are AVAILABLE to the sickest. |
I think you are reinforcing my point. The single most potent weapon against Covid was the availability of effective vaccines. These were developed in record time; the Trump Administration deserves a lot of credit for their significant role in that effort. The current protocols and treatments to which you refer also largely pre-dated Biden as the medical community eliminated its early missteps. So Biden was handed a winning formula yet the number of deaths has not declined, this despite the fact that a large percentage of the population has been vaccinated for some time, and the likelihood is that the most vulnerable succumbed in the first year.
| coboardhead wrote: | | Yet, my biggest gripe with Trump continues. He continues to promote avoidance of vaccines. He continues to call the virus a hoax. |
I simply don't believe that. Citation please.
| coboardhead wrote: | | Simply looking at total deaths, within a time period, and judging this response indicates a misunderstanding of this progression. |
I'm sure it will be a great comfort to the loved ones of the more than 600,000 who have died on Biden's watch, that that those deaths were caused by a "health concern" not by a pandemic. I'm also sure that if Trump had won a second term and the country had seen no drop in the numbers of deaths, that your rationalization, and frequency of comment would have been entirely different.
"220,000 deaths.........anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain President of the United States of America' - Joe Biden. |
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coboardhead
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4304
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2022 10:05 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341080858_Donald_Trump_and_vaccination_The_effect_of_political_identity_conspiracist_ideation_and_presidential_tweets_on_vaccine_hesitancy
I agree that the COVID pandemic was politicized. But, Trump was responsible for much of the rhetoric. There is no question that he discouraged vaccines even while his Administration was finding the development of the vaccines.
You may see this as a success of his Administration. I see the failure of his Administration to take responsible steps to promote the vaccines. The sad fact that the Pandemic is now taking more of the anti vax crowd, promoted by Trump, is a clear indication of the continued damage his rhetoric caused.
So. You would have me pat Trump on the back when the vaccine was developed during his tenure yet forget how he disparaged the science of the vaccines and the protocols that were being developed? This is absurd. |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5181
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2022 10:34 pm Post subject: |
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| coboardhead wrote: | | Yet, my biggest gripe with Trump continues. He continues to promote avoidance of vaccines. He continues to call the virus a hoax. He still has a significant following who believe anything he says. That may be part of the reason that the Red counties continue to die at higher rates due to COVID infection than those that are Blue. |
You assert that Trump continues to promote avoidance of vaccines and to call the virus a hoax, and you believe this may explain why death rates have not improved despite the unquestioned significant advances which have reduced mortality numbers elsewhere in the world.
Will you please provide a citation for your assertions. Thank you. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17780
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2022 11:15 pm Post subject: |
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| Carefully ignored (is there something in the Virginia water?) is the sad fact that the deaths under Biden are disproportionately among people who refuse to get vaccinated. Ignore all inconvenient facts. It does so much to help your credibility. |
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coboardhead
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4304
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2022 3:53 pm Post subject: |
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Mrgybe
You’re correct. I missed Trump’s reversal on vaccines…as did many of his followers. Maybe he should get his son to shut up too! |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
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swchandler
Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2022 11:28 pm Post subject: |
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We have to agree that Donald Trump did promote a lot of goofy, and very dangerous ideas to fend off the Covid 19 virus. The ingestion of bleach was arguably the most laughable. Unbelievable. Leave it to an unfit character like Trump to spread such total nonsense. It's hard to believe that some think Trump was a great leader.
While Trump may not have called the Covid19 pandemic was a hoax, he did try repeatedly to downplay its significance. As I recollect, he cavalierly stressed that it was no big deal.
President Biden, on the other hand, can be highly praised for his aggressive policies to vaccinate all Americans. I honestly don't think that Trump was remotely capable of delivering that kind of leadership. |
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coachg
Joined: 10 Sep 2000
Posts: 3564
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| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2022 12:38 am Post subject: |
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Trump didn't call the virus a hoax, he said the virus was the Democrats "new hoax" at a rally. Take it as you want, but Trump definitely downplayed the virus early on and politically attacked those who took the virus seriously & took early measures against the virus.
Coachg |
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coachg
Joined: 10 Sep 2000
Posts: 3564
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| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2022 12:40 am Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | | That was a lie put out by Biden which has been completely debunked by all the major fact checkers. You were played by your candidate and have dutifully repeated the falsehood. |
Kind of like your candidates lie about Obama's birth certificate. I guess it's true, what goes around comes around.
Coachg |
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