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- cross-posted to:
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“We will see if this is a legal and valid election,” Stefanik, a member of House GOP leadership and a Donald Trump ally, said in an interview with “Meet the Press.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., on Sunday wouldn’t commit to certifying the 2024 election results during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
While interviewing Stefanik, who serves in House Republican leadership, host Kristen Welker asked, “Would you vote to certify, and will you vote to certify, the results of the 2024 election no matter what they show?”
Stefanik, who has boosted former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, said that she did not vote to certify the 2020 results in the state of Pennsylvania and several other states because there were “unconstitutional acts circumventing the state legislature and unilaterally changing election law.”
The media also spent a lot of time letting Trump just say whatever he wanted without any criticism. Which I think was their point. Maybe if you’re going to report on this stuff, also push back on it.
In the Before Times, they didn’t have to criticize. Just reporting obvious fuckery would have been enough.
Like when? When we went into Iraq because WMDs?
When you say that, what do you have in mind?
Off the top of my head:
Which one of those people were not criticized?
To take one example that I was very closely following, Blagojevich:
Reporting at the time was not overly critical; all that was needed was to report the facts of the matter, because the general public was in agreement on the nature of reality, something which is horribly lacking today.
What do you think Blagojevich said that he was rightly not criticized for saying?
You don’t even remember that whole thing, do you?
Selling Obama’s seat in congress?
The imaginary fifth one.
Lol
There’s plenty of media pushing back on him. It’s basically a huge maga-cultist complaint that they aren’t very nice to Trump, because they point out and dissect what he has said and criticize it. They see the lopsided amount of times his BS is being called out as evidence that the media is biased against him, not that he spews a lopsided amount of BS.
That depends on what you are reading. However, good journalism should be impartial. It should not criticize or provide opinion, it should report facts (including fact checking when a person says bullshit). But to give opinion is arguably bad journalism, or better to say, not journalism. It is political analysis/opinion column/political show. Which is part of the media too, of course, but it is often confused with the good journalism.
Walter Cronkite did it. He almost singlehandedly changed the nation’s general opinion on the Vietnam War. And most people would consider Walter Cronkite to have been an excellent journalist.
Also, ‘criticism’ is not the same as ‘opinion.’ If Trump says something false, he should be rightly criticized for saying that false thing. That is not an opinion-based issue.
Excellent journalist can do non-journalist analysis too. It is just not journalistic reporting.
Interesting that you ignored the more important part of my post.
Because what you called criticism, I called fact checking, and I mention it in my original statement. You don’t criticize when you report. You simply state that it is false.
Showing that something someone said isn’t true is a form of criticism.
OK. I think you can say that. But using this terminology, I would say that there is difference to criticize something as (factually) incorrect and (morally) wrong. The former is the job of good journalism, the later is not.
Hard disagree. A good journalist is partial to objectivity and speaks truth to power.
When Trump is spreading baseless conspiracy theories, most of which literally endanger the lives of his intended target, you don’t just fucking let him do it without any pushback and let people without any background in relevant fields try to figure out whether he’s lying.
That’s journalistic malpractice and also how the world got to the point where one of the two main parties is a literal fascist movement rather than a legitimate political party.
You can only fact check so much in real time, especially when you’re talking to someone who swings wildly between rambling nonsense and turning dog whistles into fog horns and you’re apparently not allowed to criticize or have opinions 🙄
In the same way that Donald Trump Jr arguably has a chin. You could make that argument, but you’d be wrong.
That is what the textbooks say. It is not reality in any way. Actual “facts only” would be boring and dry - and news should be that way but it isn’t and I think we all know why.
Besides, word choice alone is an opinion. There’s almost no such thing as reporting without an opinion. The actual method is to recognize that opinion exists, not to pretend there isn’t one. The latter is what corporate news sewers do.
Selecting what stories to report is also an opinion. Just saw a headline from WaPo today of “Trump makes fun of Biden’s stutter” like this is a newsworthy thing to cover for a potential presidential candidate. Look at Trump breaking norms and being uncouth! Surely this important and objective recounting of his every utterance will inform the public and make people think he’s not fit to be president rather than make him look like a alpha troll cutting down an old dude who can’t talk good.
Good journalism provides context, draws attention to cause and effect, and doesn’t pretend that events occur in a vacuum.
That’s true. But it is still can be done in impartial way.
Neutrality in situations of oppression amounts to aligning with the oppressor.
Neutrality in situations of straight-up violating norms and standards and telling lies… aligns with the liar.
Neutrality to a fault… is a fault.
At some point, if you’re neutral to the point that you’re unwilling to take a critical stance of anything, you could save yourself the effort as a journalist and just forward along everyone’s press releases and quit pretending that the role of the journalist in the 1st Amendment is to hold the powerful accountable and to tell truths they might not want told- and get on with that business of licking those delicious boots
One doesn’t have to be neutral, but one can separate one’s opinion from facts.
Impartial is one thing, but being impartial while one side relies on outright lies is another thing.
To give an example, back when I was in college (the mid-90s), my college newspaper ran an article from a Holocaust denier. At the time, he was going across the country trying to get college newspapers to run his “the Holocaust never happened” piece and my college’s newspaper agreed to it. I confronted the editor-in-chief and he replied “we have to tell both sides of the story.”
Except there aren’t two sides of this story. There’s one. The Holocaust happened. That’s a historical fact. Trying to “be impartial” with this is to elevate wild conspiracy theories to the same position as historical facts.
This. If one person says it’s raining and another says it isn’t, a journalist’s job isn’t to report that “expert opinions vary on the state of the weather”, a journalist’s job is to go the fuck outside and figure out if it’s raining.
Impartial reporting of FACTS is not given equal time to facts and falsities.