Editorial Content

Columnist Bows, Corrects View

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Article in Raw Story by Erik De La Garze, 12/18/24

Headline: ” ‘Incredibly craven’: Social media slams NYT columnist’s reversal on ‘Never Trump’ “

“Social media users came out swinging against a conservative New York Times columnist who this week declared he was ‘done with never Trump,’ and suggested the movement defeated itself.

“The online backlash came in response to a Tuesday opinion piece by Bret Stephens, who said he believes Trump’s second term could be ‘as bad as his most fervent critics fear,’ but still urged readers to send warm wishes to the new administration and give his cabinet selections ‘the benefit of the doubt.’

“ ‘It is incredibly craven to pretend to take a principled stand against Trump only to rescind it when it becomes clear that Trump isn’t actually going away and there is nothing to be personally gained from the ostentatious display of ‘principle,’ University of Texas at Austin professor Mike Boyla-Kolchin wrote on Bluesky.”

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2670492806/

Relax, Nothing to Report Here

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Article in The Guardian by Dani Anguiano, 12/18/24

Headline:  “LA Times owner asks editorial board to ‘take a break’ from writing about Trump – report”

Subhead:  “Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who said paper is ‘echo chamber’, also blocked paper’s board from endorsing Harris”

“Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, reportedly asked the newspaper’s editorial board to “take a break” from writing about Donald Trump, in the latest report of the billionaire owner’s growing influence over the newspaper’s coverage.

“The newspaper and its owner were embroiled in controversy for weeks this fall after Soon-Shiong blocked the board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. The decision led to a wave of resignations on the editorial board and the loss of thousands of subscriptions.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/18/la-times-patrick-soon-shiong-trump

Lawyers Fight Any Bad News

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Article in The Hill by Dominick Mastrangelo & Brett Samuels, 12/17/24

Headline:  “ABC News settlement with Trump sends chill through media”

“ABC News’s decision to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by President-elect Trump is sending a chill through the media, with press organizations suggesting it is a major blow.

“It should not be seen as normal for powerful elected officials to wage legal campaigns against members of the press and their employers,” Caroline Hendrie, executive director of the Society of Professional Journalists, told The Hill on Monday.”

https://thehill.com/media/5042894-abc-news-settlement-with-trump-sends-chill-through-media/

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Article in The Hill by Zach Schonfeld, 12/17/24

Headline:  “Trump sues Des Moines Register, pollster”

“President-elect Trump sued The Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer on Monday over a poll released just before Election Day indicating Vice President Harris had a sizable lead in Iowa.

The poll found Harris leading Trump in Iowa by 3 percentage points days before Trump won the Hawkeye State by 14 percentage points as voters sent him back to the White House.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed in Iowa state court in Polk County, accuses the outlet and pollster of violating Iowa’s consumer fraud laws by engaging in deception.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5043821-donald-trump-des-moines-register-ann-selzer-lawsuit/

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Article in FAIR by Ari Paul, 12/16/24

Headline:  “ABC Settles With Trump in a Case It Could Have Won”

“ABC has agreed to pay $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library and $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees “to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll” (AP, 12/14/24).”

https://fair.org/home/abc-settles-with-trump-in-a-case-it-could-have-won/

 

 

Selective Coverage – Vital Issues

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Article in Media Matters by Harrison Ray, 12/10/24

Headline:  “Cable news is barely covering Trump and GOP plans to slash Medicaid’

Subhead:  “CNN and Fox News almost completely ignored the Republicans’ plans”

“Cable news networks largely ignored changes the incoming Trump administration and congressional Republicans are reportedly considering to limit access to Medicaid.

The proposals have raised alarms among health care advocates, who warn of potentially devastating impacts to vulnerable populations including children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

Since November 14, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC have given the Republicans’ potential plans only 40 minutes of coverage. MSNBC led networks with over 33 minutes coverage. However, both CNN and Fox News largely failed to cover the story

https://www.mediamatters.org/health-care/cable-news-is-barely-covering-Trump-and-GOP-plans-to-slash-medicaid

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Article in Media Matters by Gideon Taffe, 12/11/24

Headline:  “Fox News is downplaying Donald Trump’s extreme agenda as moderate”

“As Donald Trump prepares to begin his second term in office, Fox News is downplaying his agenda that threatens to deport millions of people, implement destructive economic policy, roll back reproductive rights, enact “retribution” against his rivals, promote anti-vaccine figures to be in charge of public health, and radically gut federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-downplaying-donald-trumps-extreme-agenda-moderate

 

 

Talk Radio Slants One Way

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Podcast on NPR by Staff 11/29/24

Headline:  “How Conservative Talk Radio Came to Dominate the Airwaves”

“How did the right get their vice grip of the airwaves, all the while arguing that they were being censored? On this week’s On the Media, a look at the early history of American radio, and why, in the post-war era, the U.S. government encouraged more diverse viewpoints on the airwaves — until it didn’t. Plus, the technological and legal changes that led to the popularity of conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. [00:10] Reporter Katie Thornton explains how radio programming shifted from the 1930s to the 1960s, and how the FCC attempted to prevent propaganda on the airwaves.”

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media

Radio Still Makes a Difference

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Article in Politico by Ali Bianco, 11/29/24

Headline: “Disinformation Transformed Miami Politics. This Radio Station Is One Reason Why”

“. . . If you’re from Miami, Radio Mambí’s celebratory vibe is no surprise. This is, after all, the radio station that has been a touchstone for Miami’s Cuban exiliados, or exiles, since they arrived. It’s the radio station that made Miami Cuban politics. But since the 2016 election, it’s morphed into a hotbed of misinformation — one that impacted the 2024 presidential election.”

‘. . .Mambí’s format is particularly suited to spreading disinformation, Gamarra notes. Like many radio stations with Caribbean roots, it isn’t strictly news-focused; its most popular shows are talk shows — and even its news segments are sprinkled with bits of commentary from announcers. With its programming centered around conservative commentary, it formed an echo chamber of MAGA messaging, according to FIU journalism professor Alejandro Alvarado.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/29/radio-mambi-miami-maga-00190415

 

Thom Hartman Interviewed by FCM

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Spencer Graves, president of Friends of Community Media,  interviewed prominent liberal talk show host and prolific author Thom Hartman which will air on Tuesday 11/26/24 6-6:30 CST on community radio station KKFI FM 90.1 on the Radio Active public affairs show in Kansas City. . The interview is also available on Wikiversity and will be available on the Pacifica Network.

Mr. Hartman spoke in September at the Grass Roots Radio Conference in New Orleans, attended by a representative of FCM on the topic of promoting democracy on our media platforms.

He has a streaming radio show at https://www.thomhartmann.com/radio/listen-live

Information about Thom Hartman may be found on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann

To listen to the interview at 6:00 Central Time you may logon to kkfi.org.  https://kkfi.org/

 

 

 

 

 

Too Late to Save the Media?

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Article in Common Dreams by Thom Hartmann 11/24/24

Headline: “Will Trump’s Return Coincide With the Death of Progressive Media?”

Subhead:  “We all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information. If we fail to do so, America’s media landscape may soon mirror those of the autocratic nations the incoming president so admires.”

“Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?

Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.

Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.

And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/progressive-media-trump

Media Kissing the Ring

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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

Defending Legacy Media Over Internet Media?

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Article in The Washington Post by Catherine Rampell, 11/5/24

Headline:  “Opinion:  This election year, legacy media consumers came out on top”

Subhead:  “We’ve made our share of mistakes, but readers of traditional media understand the stakes of this election.”

“. . . If you had consumed all your election news this year exclusively from The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or other journalistic dinosaurs, you’d probably be well-informed. You’d have a sense of what the stakes are this election. You might even know what the candidates stand for! The same cannot be said if you instead primarily relied on TikTok influencers, random bros with podcasts or Discord streams, and Elon Musk’s X platform.”

“. . . We traditional journalists don’t get things right all the time. We have biases we’re often blind to. We make errors of omission, commission and emphasis. But we are (usually) embarrassed when we get stuff wrong, and we have procedures for transparently correcting our mistakes.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/05/media-2024-presidential-election/