CNN scolded on live TV for 'over-the-top' Afghanistan coverage: '5,000 people died of Covid in this
CNN Reliable Sources is one of the few CNN shows that I watch. I was disappointed with Steiter covering up for Chris Cuomo a couple of weeks ago, Dowd has been hitting the media on the horrible coverage of the Afghanistan coverage.
Link to tweet
"[The coverage was] way over the top and unconnected to a perspective on the issue from the beginning," Dowd told CNN's Brian Stelter on Sunday. "They've added more perspective in the final days but from the beginning, they didn't have a perspective on it."
"We should judge it by the data," he continued. "And sometimes the press has a tendency to judge things by anecdotes and not the data. And the data for the last week shows that Joe Biden has basically gotten 30,000 people out of Afghanistan without a single loss of American life."
= new reply since forum marked as read
And I mean all of it. I truly do not give a shit what network has the better ratings. And I'm tired of pundits. And yes, I largely blame this on Former Guy totally destroying credible news organizations in favor of ass kissing shit networks. 
I mean in this case CNN would get scolded no matter what they do because other forces are calling the shots. And again, this is all on Former Guy. 
in 2002.
I can watch any good clips on DU.
(and except for a couple "big news" events over the past year and this was NOT one of them, I have not had the cable TV news on)
The first was the scramble by the media outlets to find a still shot of a helicopter hovering over a building to manufacture a comparison of the evacuation of Kabul to the evacuation of Saigon.
For example, this nonsense -
Once they made that comparison, then they completely blanked out the 2021 "reality" and internalized the "Kabul = Vietnam" meme, and have been running with it, shoe-horning all kinds of nonsense into what they believe is happening with Afghanistan. It's literally like they are brainwashed and are viewing something completely off.
It reminds me of the early scenes of the film "The Manchurian Candidate" and how the captured U.S. soldiers were brainwashed, with the scenes flipping between them sitting in a row facing an audience of Chinese soldiers and what their brains were actually "programmed" to see - an audience of older women who had come to hear a lecture on hydrangeas.
And the second was the realization that there are many of these "foreign correspondents" who have literally made a career - because this has gone on for 20 years - out of reporting from Afghanistan. Many had already "lost" their reporting duties from Iraq when that was pretty much wound down, and now they are finding themselves SOL with nowhere to go, and were apparently caught off guard at the suddenness of the conclusion of what has been a never-ending military engagement.
So it's like they are now playing out, live on TV, their stages of grief, where they are lashing out at what they believe is the cause of what will be a loss of their jobs. Their selfishness and immaturity tarnishes the whole point of their occupation. I.e., Dan Rather, who was a reporter in Vietnam, didn't have a meltdown when that war was finally concluded.
In the past - pre-2000s - the media used to hold annual (and sometimes more frequent) panel discussions akin to what would later be dubbed "Lessons Learned" exercises, to evaluate their coverage of certain stories. It seems they have stopped doing this.