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Sleepwalking in to 2020
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Has Achieved Nirvana
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A very long series of statements made by journalists from various outlets - from the NYT and several smaller hometown newspapers to sundry internet pundits.

It's quite good. Lots of insight on how the media got caught flatfooted in 2016 and what- if anything - they are doing differently now. No shortage of both-siding, a nice helping of pearl-clutching, a bit of what sounds like honest reflection and perhaps some progress.

But the title of the piece says it all. There isn't a single Conservative news outlet interviewed for the piece. No Daily Caller. No Breitbart. Most tellingly, no Fox News.

Sleepwalking in to 2020.


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Life is short. Play with your dog.

 
Posts: 34852 | Location: Hooterville, OH | Registered: 23 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Minor Deity
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The underlying theme you can hear in almost all these pieces, save perhaps Reuters, is 'It's all Trump's fault that we screwed up'.

I don't think they have learned a single thing.


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"A mob is a place where people go to get away from their conscience" Atticus Finch

 
Posts: 13525 | Registered: 20 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I don't think we read the same article.

But that seems to be how things go these days.


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37794 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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My notables:

quote:
Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News: The media has this incredible quadrennial habit of learning all the lessons of four years ago and applying them when the medium has already moved on. Things keep changing, yet we fight the last war. So I think the media is totally prepared not to repeat the mistakes of the last cycle, like giving Trump endless livestreams and letting him use provocative tweets to dominate the conversation, but I’m sure we will **** it up in some new way we aren’t expecting.


quote:
“Try not to get caught up in the theater”
Weaning off of a Trump media obsession


quote:
Hayes Brown, senior editor and reporter, BuzzFeed: When you look back at the Nixon impeachment situation, people only had a few news sources at that time. They had their local paper, they had the big three networks. And that was it. Maybe if you were very fashionable in the middle of the country, you somehow got the New York Times delivered. And you read the news magazines, but that was really it in terms of media. Now people can go to wherever they want to find the facts that they agree with. On the one hand, this breakdown, this splintering, that has allowed for the rise of new voices, allowed for more diversity, allowed for more opinions to come forward, without having this, you know, establishment system saying, ‘Well, these are the stories we care about.’ On the other hand, it’s made it much harder for the average person to look out there and figure out what is the objective truth.


quote:
Betsy West, Columbia journalism professor and co-director of the documentary “RBG”: One of the scariest developments in our political landscape is that disinformation is moving from print to video. We saw this foreshadowed this year with two different videos of a supposedly drunken or stammering Nancy Pelosi that were crudely faked. These videos were quickly revealed to be phony but not before millions of viewers saw and shared them on social media. You can just imagine the potential havoc created by a video showing a candidate doing or saying something inappropriate that comes out on the eve of an election.

It’s one thing to write a false story that gets disseminated. It’s something even more powerful to create a video that appears to be real.


quote:
Baquet, New York Times: All of us in the media were just so convinced Trump couldn’t win. But he was outside of the paint-by-numbers game we have developed.


quote:
Ramos, Univision: I’m seeing more reporters who are not believing the polls and doing their homework. I personally am listening to conservative radio stations in Miami that I didn’t listen to in 2016 trying to understand Trump voters, specifically Latino Trump voters.


quote:
Gitlin, Columbia University: There was a sense after 2016 that we weren’t listening to enough people in diners in Ohio. That wasn’t so much misguided as it was inflated. The average Trump voter has above-average income. Overall—to generalize—news media went from not noticing people whose life chances are impacted by the rustification of the Midwest to thinking that they are now the central story. It’s an absurd overcompensation. This is another instance of pack journalism, from ignoring a population to doubling down on a population. And in both cases, it’s a stampede reaction, not grounded in sociological knowledge or political science knowledge, but rather in a kind of feeling of having failed to get the odds right during the campaign. [Reporters felt] that it was incumbent upon them to find a simple solution or simple remedy. Simple compensation. ‘Okay, we blew that. We’re going to do it better this time.’ Except it’s a false solution. It’s a solution on the cheap. It doesn’t come to grips with the way in which a career racketeer got away with presenting himself as a plausible politician.


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37794 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Pinta & the Santa Maria
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The media landscape has changed dramatically. Many people get their news from Facebook or the Daily Show. Trump has been remarkably successful in turning a large portion of the population against traditional media outlets. "Fake news" has become synonymous with "news I don't agree with." We all have had to learn to read far more critically. A mistake in reporting doesn't place a generally reputable news outlet into the same category as InfoWars. There are flat-out propaganda outlets that are quoted as if they are neutral sources.

The fight for eyeballs is real. Filling those 24 hours needs content, and not all of it is news. We've all laughed at the breathless, panicky the-sky-is-falling emergency "breaking news" stories.

The media shares a lot of the blame.

Aside to mik-- I didn't read the same subtext as you. What I read was a lot more "we allowed ourselves to be played by Trump." That, I think, is still an issue. Re-read Frank Bruni's comments. I think he gets it.

My 2c!
 
Posts: 35367 | Location: West: North and South! | Registered: 20 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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+1

Nina, I envy your ability to zoom in on the issues and summarize them so articulately and concisely.

groupwave


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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Bazootiehead-in-training



 
Posts: 37794 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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This piece?

quote:
Frank Bruni, columnist, New York Times: There’s a real tension in the media as we go into 2020, and a real challenge. We are an industry that is hardly swimming in revenue, we are competing fiercely for the eyeballs we need to stay alive. And we’ve learned that if you write a story about the ridiculousness of Trump’s latest tweet – whether that story is riveting to his fans or to his foes who cannot marinate enough in their distaste of him – it gets a lot more traffic than an analysis of Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-all plan. Trump understands what news catches people’s interest, he has a very acute sense of what people will click on. So I’m concerned that we are going to end up giving Trump more than the lion’s share of media time all the way up to election night.


Huge problem right there. The fact Bruni sees it and figures he'll have to do it anyway because of $ makes it even worse.


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Life is short. Play with your dog.

 
Posts: 34852 | Location: Hooterville, OH | Registered: 23 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Pinta & the Santa Maria
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yep, that's what I was referring to, and I agree with your assessment
 
Posts: 35367 | Location: West: North and South! | Registered: 20 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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