enarcmot

Media Using Facts Too Liberal?

by


Article in The Washington Post by Megan McArdle, 11/18/24

Headline:  “Opinion: Liberal media bias is hurting Democrats. Really.”

Subhead:  “Diminishing trust in media shows Democrats should not rely on friendly referees.”

“Democrats got good at working friendly media refs in the era when most voters got their political news from three networks, one or two local papers and a handful of political magazines. But the old gatekeepers no longer have those monopolies; now they control access to a much smaller walled garden, full of nice liberals talking to each other. Outside, the messages they don’t want to hear are racing through the untamed jungle of new media: podcasts, YouTube streams and social media sites.

“The gatekeepers know this, hence all the complaints about ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’ Unfortunately, the only people who can hear their denunciations are the folks at the garden party.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/18/media-bias-democrats-harris/

More of the Incredible Shrinking Media

by


Article in The Guardian by Anna Betts, 11/18/24

Associated Press to cut 8% of staff through layoffs and buyouts

Agency president says fewer than half of cuts should affect news division as 121 people reportedly given buyout offers

“The Associated Press announced on Monday that it plans to reduce its workforce by 8% through a combination of voluntary buyouts and layoffs.

“In an internal email obtained by the Guardian, AP’s president, Daisy Veerasingham, informed staff that adapting to industry challenges requires “making some difficult changes so we can invest more fully in our future”.

” ‘We all know this is a time of transformation in the media sector,’ the email said. “Our customers – both who they are and what they need from us – are changing rapidly.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/18/associated-press-layoffs

War on the Media?

by


Article in Common Dreams by Julia Conley, 11/15/24

Headline:  ” ‘Potentially Ominous Trend’ for Press Freedom as Trump Wages Legal War on News Outlets”

Subhead:  ” ‘Governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries,’ said one journalist.”

” ‘The press freedom fire is at our door step now,’ said one Washington Post journalist on Thursday night after news broke that two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office, he has already begun to wage legal warfare against on the news media.

“The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)reported that days before the election, a lawyer for Trump, Edward Andrew Paltzik, sent a letter to The New York Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages for publishing articles and a book that were critical of the president-elect, who was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/new-york-times-trump-unfit

Bad Media? Ban ‘Em From the Press Room

by

Article in Daily Kos by News Corpse, 11/13/24

Headline: “HUH? Fox News Asks Biden’s Press Sec if He Apologized to Trump for Saying He’s a Threat to Democracy”

Subhead:  “America needs to prepare itself for what’s to come in the White House Press Briefing room. Axios is reporting that Trump is expected to ‘shake it up.’ “

“Trump’s first administration tried to ban outlets it saw as unfavorable from off-camera press briefings. That included the New York Times, Politico, CNN and BBC.” […]

“Any efforts to expand access to daily press briefings to pro-Trump outlets, such as Steve Bannon’s War Room, would need to come at the expense of existing outlets.”

“So get ready for briefings that feature folks like Bannon, Alex Jones, and Laura Loomer. The ‘mainstream’ media reporters from the New York Times and CBS and NPR will all be banished as ‘fake news.’ And Trump’s press secretary is likely to be someone like his former attorney Alina Habba or his daughter Tiffany. Which means the rest of the media had better grow a spine and be prepared to protect the very notion of a free press.”

https://www.dailykos.com/blogs/Media%20Watch

Media Kissing the Ring

by

Article in Freepress by Craig Aaron, 11/15/24

Headline:  “Media and Tech Billionaires Helped Elect Trump — and Now They’re Ready to Serve”

Subhead:  “First, they come for the media”

“Surveying the wreckage after the 2024 election, many post-mortems have tried to explain the tactical or messaging mishaps that led to Trump’s victory. But a lot of them have missed the most obvious culprit: the media.

“Yes, in this case, it is appropriate to blame the messengers —– or at least their billionaire bosses.

“In 2024, instead of acting as a check on power, the media aided and abetted Trump’s restoration at every turn — whether by outright manipulating their platforms to push Trump propaganda, relentlessly amplifying racist conspiracy theories, suppressing political content while groveling before Republican politicians, abandoning political endorsements and undermining their own journalists, profiting off the relentless onslaught of misleading political ads, or focusing on the horse-race stories, opinion-poll watching and fake scandalizing that infects political reporting everywhere.”

“. . . Trump and those around him have learned from other strongmen that rule once-democratic societies. Look at Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022 that the path to power is to “have your own media.” Or Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, where some of Trump’s biggest backers have tested these strategies and staged a right-wing media takeover, leading to a dangerous alternate reality on the airwaves that conceals war crimes and attacks dissenters. . . ”

https://www.freepress.net/blog/media-and-tech-billionaires-helped-elect-trump-and-now-theyre-ready-serve

Media Are Not Resisting, Won’t Save us Now

by

Nope – no Lone Ranger for us!

Article in Politico by Michael Schaffer, 11/15/24

Headline:  “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”

Subhead:  “The first Trump administration sparked waves of public activism and aggressive media coverage. This time, not so much.”

“n the weeks before the 2024 election, no media platform had more catnip for Donald Trump’s detractors than the Drudge Report. Much of the time, its exclamation-pointed homepage banners were trumpeting the GOP candidate’s physical decay: Here, a link to Trump unable to open a garbage truck door! There, a newspaper editorial about his alarming cognitive decline! Just as often, they were announcing his danger to the republic. “EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO DEMOCRACY,” blared a typical late-October headline.

“One week after the election, it was a different story: Punching in Control-F on the Drudge homepage and searching the word “Trump” this Tuesday returned exactly zero hits.. . ”

“”. . .A media ecosystem that left so many Democrats surprised about Kamala Harris’ loss doesn’t much help the resistance, does it?”

“. . . Now, if the great blue tune-out of 2024 is what it appears to be, there won’t immediately be some new burst of energy to help serious publications grow back their numbers.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/15/trump-presidency-liberal-media-resistance-00189655

Refugees From Social Media Disinformation

by

Article in The Guardian by Gaby Hinsliff, 11/15/24

Headline:  “The exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over”

Subhead:  “There’s comfort in being surrounded by like-minded people, but challenge is important, and we may have to look for it elsewhere”

“Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online . . .”

“Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall. But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives. You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election . . . ”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/15/x-bluesky-social-media-platforms

Don’t Like Media – Sue ‘Em

by

Article from The Guardian by Maya Yang, 11/15/24

Headline:  “Trump sues for billions from media he says is biased against him”

Subhead:  “President-elect intensifies longstanding media hostility by filing lawsuits against New York Times, CBS and others”

“With only two months left until Donald Trump returns to the White House, the president-elect and convicted felon has been waging lawfare by a flurry of lawsuits against media companies and publishers that have been critical of him.

“The lawsuits come amid growing fears of what a second Trump term would mean for press freedom as Trump intensifies his longstanding hostility against the media – which he called ‘the enemy camp’ in his victory speech last week.”

“. . .In response to Trump’s re-election victory and his repeated attacks against journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists has called Trump’s threats against the press a ‘clear and direct danger to media freedom.’

“ ‘The hostile media climate fostered during Donald Trump’s first presidency – expected to continue in his forthcoming second term – poses great risks to media inside and outside the country,’ ” CPJ added.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/15/trump-sues-media-outlets-bias

Idiotic Medium buys Idiotic Website

by

latest post from Infowars


Update:

Article in The Guardian by Anna Betts and agency, 11/15/24

Headline:  “Judge orders hearing to review Onion’s purchase of Alex Jones’s InfoWars”

Subhead:  “Judge to audit if conspiracy theorist’s bankruptcy auction was fair, which could delay buying process for satire site”

“On Thursday morning, it was announced that the Onion had bought InfoWars at Jones’s bankruptcy auction.

“But later that day, the judge overseeing Jones’s bankruptcy case held an emergency hearing, during which lawyers representing Jones and a company affiliated with him expressed concerns about the auction process. The judge has ordered an evidentiary hearing for next week to determine if the auction was conducted fairly, which could delay the process.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/15/the-onion-infowars-bankruptcy

————————————————
Article in The Guardian by Anna Betts, 11/14/24

Headline: “The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, ‘very stupid’ ”

Subhead:  “Satirical news outlet purchases media platform run by Alex Jones at a court-ordered auction”

“The satirical news outlet The Onion has purchased Infowars, the rightwing media platform run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, at a court-ordered auction.”

“CEO Ben Collins confirmed this in a post on Bluesky on Thursday, writing: ‘The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars. We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.’ ”

“. . . The sale follows a judge’s order earlier this year for Jones to liquidate his personal assets, to help him to pay off the $1.4bn he was ordered to pay the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six educators when they took him to court for defamation after he falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax, and that they were actors who staged the shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/14/onion-info-wars-alex-jones

——————————————

Article in Status News by Oliver Darcy, 11/14/24

Headline:  “Not Satire: The Onion acquires Infowars“

“As part of the deal, The Onion, owned by Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson and led by chief executive Ben Collins, acquired Infowars‘ website, product inventory, customers lists, social media accounts, and intellectual property.”

“. . . Owen Shroyer, a popular Infowars personality, expressed disbelief at the news The Onion had acquired the company.

“ ‘It’s almost like a satire of a satire,” Shroyer said on Infowars’ final broadcast. “It’s like a joke of a joke.’ ”

https://www.status.news/p/not-satire-the-onion-acquires-infowars

——————————————

Article in Common Dreams by Julia Conley, 11/14/24

Headline:  “Media Justice as The Onion Buys Infowars From ‘Hateful’ (and Bankrupt) Alex Jones”

Subhead:  ” ‘This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane,’ said the CEO of The Onion. “

“In what one journalist called an “insane twist” to the long saga of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ use of his online platform to spread rampant disinformation, satirical newspaper The Onion on Thursday announced it had won an auction to buy Infowars, Jones’ bankrupt publication. ”

“. . . ‘The Onion’s goal with the acquisition is to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good,’ said the company in a press release, which did not state how much The Onion paid for Infowars. ”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/infowars-auction

 

Techno Global Media Hegemony

by

Article in TechXplore by Lewis Mitchell, Jono Tuke and Melissa Humphries, 11/14/24

Headline: “Elon Musk has turned X into a globally influential media platform—and there’s more to come”

“During the recent United States presidential election campaign, tech billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) saw record high usage.”

“. . . He aims to create a platform for messages, payments, video and more, similar to China’s WeChat . . . ”

“. . . Musk, and therefore X, is also poised to take a bigger role in day-to-day US politics—and not just in his newly announced role, which will see him in charge of cutting government spending.”

“. . . Since the election, alternative social media platform Bluesky has reportedly gained 1 million members as some users of X attempt to flee the perceived far-right platform.”

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-11-elon-musk-globally-influential-media.html