We already dropped LATimes so I can't check that. But it's interesting to see who considers it newsworthy. Most of the Montana papers I checked led with "A swastika-tattooed suspect..."
We already dropped LATimes so I can't check that. But it's interesting to see who considers it newsworthy. Most of the Montana papers I checked led with "A swastika-tattooed suspect..."
Inside the Meltdown at CNN CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the networkâs reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?
One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than âsave journalism.â But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.
It comes as no surprise that corporate media likes a good, wholesome war as much as the average American. It sells. Morally ambiguous wars, or worse, peace, do not sell. People lose interest. This NYT article is illustrative of so many articles in corporate media about Ukraine and war.
The real story here, other than corporate media being a megaphone for the Pentagon, is of one man trying to redeem his past acts of violence by committing future acts of violence in yet another proxy war of superpowers. It is a story of a culture of militarism and toxic masculinity perpetuating the idea that if we can just find a good, morally unambiguous war all will be well with our society.
The New Kremlinology: Reading the New York Times With censorship soaring and real reporting all but taboo, the major dailies have just one important function left: being a political signaling system.
Historically, the amount of news coverage devoted to foreign wars has been positively correlated with the direct involvement of the U.S. military. âNormal expectations are that wars are always more newsworthy in America when American lives are at risk,â according to Tyndall, who noted that the only war in the last several decades to which the networks devoted as much time in one month as last monthâs total coverage of Ukraine was in Kosovo in April 1999 (565 minutes) when U.S. aircraft led NATOâs bombing campaign against Serbia.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in late February, âhas overturned all normal patterns of journalistic response,â according to Tyndall. He gave most of the credit to the leadership and media savvy of President Volodymyr Zelensky who has largely controlled the narrative conveyed to Americans via the networks.
âIt is a demonstration of Zelenskyâs perceived newsworthiness that both ABC World News tonight and NBC Nightly News decided to assign their anchors to an extended interview with him, despite the fact that he would not be speaking English, meaning that the audio would consist of the stilted tones of a simultaneous translator,â Tyndall observed.
It also helped that âthe overall structure of the coverage has been Kyiv-based,â in part due to Russiaâs enactment of strict censorship coverage that, among other things, made it much more difficult to cover Moscowâs views. âYet, more unusual for the American news media, there has been precious little coverage from Washington,â Tyndall observed. âNormally in a war in which the United States is not involved, it would be the default position of the American news media to search for a fair-and-balanced way to present both sides of the conflict. It is to Zelenskyâs credit that, this time, the networks had no problem seeing the conflict from his point of view.â
(...)
The Ukraine coverage in March also crowded out the latest developments in the devastating humanitarian crises caused by Afghanistanâs collapsed economy and the ongoing wars in Yemen and Ethiopia.
âClinton campaign, Democratic Party to settle campaign finance inquiry for $113Kâ
The Hill. âHillary Clintonâs 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have settled a campaign finance inquiry, agreeing to pay a collective $113,000 in fines that stemmed from the controversial dossier on then-candidate Donald Trumpâs ties to Russia, known as the Steele Dossier. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined the campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for failing to properly report money spent on research for the dossier. The financial penalties came to light in a letter the FEC sent to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, a conservative group, after it filed a complaint. The FEC determined that Clintonâs campaign disclosed the $175,000 it spent on research for the dossier as âlegal services,â but the complainant alleged it was meant for âopposition research done by Fusion .â The funds went to Perkins Coie, the law firm that recruited opposition research group Fusion GPS, which brought on retired British spy Christopher Steele. The regulatory agency noted that political committees must disclose the purpose of expenditures or disbursements that are larger than $200.â ⢠What?! You mean everybody knew the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele Dossier all the time? Say itâs not so! (Money well spent, so far as Iâm concerned, considering the leverage the permanent Clinton campaign got from it.)
