Media Properly Acknowledge the Leader

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Article in Mediaite by Colby Hall, 11/18/24

Headline:  “Bitterly Divided Mediasphere Unites To Destroy Joe and Mika Meeting With Trump: ‘Annals of Shamelessness…’ “

Subhead:  “The most vocal critiques came from Trump’s most loyal media surrogates and past advisors:”

“The political media ecosphere has been bitterly divided over Donald Trump, but an effort by Morning Joe’s co-hosts to bridge the divide and ‘restart communications’ has ushered in a harmonic convergence of the chattering class, though not in the manner Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski may have intended.”

“. . . the stated goal of the MSNBC morning show hosts as “time for a new approach” was viewed less laudably by nattering nabobs. Instead, it was derided as evidence that Scarborough and Brzezinski seemed to not believe in the conviction of their previous criticisms. The criticism came from provocateurs and thought leaders from both ends of the political spectrum.”

https://www.mediaite.com/news/bitterly-divided-mediasphere-unites-to-destroy-joe-and-mika-meeting-with-trump-annals-of-shamelessness/

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Article in The Hill by Dominick Mastrangelo, 11/18/24

Headline:  ” ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough, Brzezinski say they traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump”

Headline:  “Nikki Haley says ‘Morning Joe’ hosts met Trump for ratings “

“Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley suggested Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” met with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago as a ploy to maintaining ratings.

“Let’s be clear, Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings,” Haley wrote on the social platform X on Monday. “They realized they needed Trump for their survival.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4995692-morning-joe-scarborough-brzezinski-say-they-traveled-to-mar-a-lago-to-meet-trump/

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Article in Huff Post by Graeme Demianyk, 11/18/24

Headline:  “JOE & MIKA KISS THE RING AT MAR-A-LAGO!AT MAR-A-LAGO!
… BUT CLAIM THEY WON’T ‘NORMALIZE’ TRUMP”

“In a prepared monologue on their Monday show, Brzezinski explained they decided to reach out to Trump’s team to see if they could have “the opportunity to speak with the president-elect” after being dismayed by his Cabinet picks.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/morning-joe-trump-scarborough-mika-brzezinski_n_673b4621e4b0f7e185133c89

 

Where People Get Their Fake News

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Article on AP by Haleluya Hadero, 11/18/24

Headline:  “About 20% of Americans regularly get their news from influencers on social media, report says”

About one in five Americans – and a virtually identical share of Republicans and Democrats – regularly get their news from digital influencers who are more likely to be found on the social media platform X, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Research Center.

The findings, drawn from a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults and an analysis of social media posts posted this summer by influencers, provide an indication of how Americans consumed the news during the height of the U.S. presidential campaign that President-elect Donald Trump ultimately won.

https://apnews.com/article/influencers-election-trump-harris-news-eacd42bce73d6e11cbc760caf28c993a

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Article in The Hill by Joanne Haner

Headline:  “1 in 5 get news from social media influencers: Pew poll “

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4996144-news-influencers-social-media/

Media Using Facts Too Liberal?

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

Media Are Not Resisting, Won’t Save us Now

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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

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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

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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