Here's the Evidence Corporate Media Say Is Missing of WaPo Bias Against Sanders

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

Or you could take the many occasions on which the Post‘s factchecking team performed impressive contortions to interpret Sander’s fact-based statements as meriting multiple “Pinocchios” (e.g., FAIR.org, 1/25/17, 3/20/17). In particular, we might observe the time the Post “factchecked” Sanders’ claim that the world’s six wealthiest people are worth as much as half the global population (FAIR.org, 10/3/17). It just so happens that one of those six multi-billionaires is Bezos, which would make an ethical journalist extra careful not to show favoritism.

Instead, after acknowledging that Sanders was, in fact, correct, the paper’s Nicole Lewis awarded him “three Pinocchios”—a rating that indicates “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.” This is because, the paper explained, even though the number comes from a reputable nonpartisan source, Oxfam, which got its data from Credit Suisse, “It’s hard to make heads or tails of what wealth actually means, with respect to people’s daily lives around the globe.”

(snip)

Curiously, the same journalists so incensed about Sanders’ lack of evidence about the Post‘s bias failed to offer any of their own about the paper’s “critical reporting” of Amazon. They’d be hard-pressed to find any. In 2017 FAIR’s Adam Johnson reviewed a year’s coverage of Amazon in the Post, the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and found that across 190 stories, only 6% leaned negative, and none were investigative exposes (FAIR.org, 7/28/17).

Nearly half (48%) of the Post‘s coverage was uncritical—meaning it didn’t even adopt the standard journalistic practice of seeking out critical or contrary third-party voices, instead reading like an Amazon press release. (My favorite: “An Exclusive Look at Jeff Bezos’ Plan to Set Up an Amazon-Like Delivery for ‘Future Human Settlement’ of the Moon,” with a picture looking up at a Bezos in shades gazing off proudly into the distance.)

(snip)

https://fair.org/home/heres-the-evidence-corporate-media-say-is-missing-of-wapo-bias-against-sanders/

Much more on the link.

[still_one]

1. Oh yeah, FAIR has no bias. Their founders supported Kucinish. All they are is an opinion piece

for their own bias

The only thing they are "fair" about is those who agree with them

[Uncle Joe]

3. WaPo Factcheck Attack on Sanders' ACA Warning at Odds With Actual Facts

(snip)

Unmoored for commercial reasons from any hard and fast standards for what constitutes a fact, media factologists are free to follow their own political whims (or those of their outlets). Which seems to be what’s going on in a recent Washington Post factchecking effort by Glenn Kessler, “Bernie Sanders’ Claim That ‘36,000 People Will Die Yearly’ if Obamacare Is Repealed” (1/14/17).

(snip)

You see, Sanders in his tweet didn’t include all the academic qualifiers that occurred in the original Annals study. (It was a study of Massachusetts, not the whole country!) And Sanders’ warning was based on the “pretty big assumption” that the ACA will not be replaced with a brand new GOP-designed program—the barest outlines of which have yet to be described.

This kind of “fuzzy math” generally merits three Pinocchios, Kessler said. What “tips this claim into four-Pinocchio territory,” though, was the fact that Sanders expressed a prediction in the future tense: He said that people “will die” rather than “could die.” I would remind Kessler that every statement about the future is necessarily uncertain, and therefore every use by a politician of the future tense should be awarded an extra Pinocchio.

Fortunately, an antidote to this nonsense appeared in the Washington Post itself, in the form of an op-ed (1/23/17) that appeared under the headline, “Repealing the Affordable Care Act Will Kill More Than 43,000 People Annually.” It was written by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, two doctors who are professors at Hunter College and lecturers at Harvard Med School; “for more than 30 years,” they note, they have “studied how death rates are affected by changes in healthcare coverage.” Their take on ACA repeal:

(snip)

https://fair.org/home/wapo-factcheck-attack-on-sanders-aca-warning-at-odds-with-actual-facts/

Much more on the link.

[lapucelle]

27. Just the framing of the headline gives the game away.

Here’s the Evidence Corporate Media Say Is Missing of WaPo Bias Against Sanders

An unbiased source would probably have avoided an agenda driven term like "corporate media", in favor of "mainstream media" or simply "media".

[still_one]

28. Yes

[BlueWI]

32. Is it inaccurate to say that the Post is corporate media?

Isn't that an easily verifiable statement about their ownership structure?

Mainstream media is just as subjective as corporate media. Just saying "media" is so general it's not even a genre.

FAIR has done some very good investigative oversight for many years and their evidence is included prominently. The organization deserves better than this kind of dismissal out of hand.

[lapucelle]

33. The term "corporate media" may be technically correct, but given FAIR's

mission statement, the organization should know better than to employ technically accurate language that has been co-opted and distorted in order to advance an agenda that serves to undermine public trust in responsible reporting. By doing so, they are little better than those they decry.

FAIR used to advocate for independent, public broadcasting and advocate for non-profit sources of responsible unbiased reporting.

When FAIR starts warning consumers against the dangers of profit-driven special interest "framers of a different narrative" and politicians like Trump producing their own alternative "news" media funded by unknown sources people might start taking FAIR seriously again.

Are the YouYube "news" channels an example of the type of "strong non-profit sources of information" that FAIR champions? It's puzzling that FAIR doesn't focus more of its attention on privately owned internet "news" sources, like TYT whose main function has been to monetize their pseudo activism.

Similarly, where was FAIR's hard-hitting exposé on outlets like RT (either in real time or now) which largely served to advance Putin's agenda during 2015-2016 election season? Odd that a group that styles itself as a media watchdog is so stunningly silent about that particular purveyor of propaganda.

Here's what the intrepid guardian of first amendment principles had to say about Russian manipulation in 2016:

Stoking Russia Panic for Partisan Gain Will Have a Long-Term Price for Peace

On Saturday’s episode of AM Joy with Joy Ann Reid, guest Malcolm Nance, a former Naval intelligence officer, summed up MSNBC’s Russia panic with this quote:

Joy Ann Reid: Because from what I’ve seen, the only people not with Hillary Clinton at this point…are people in the Jill Stein camp. Jill Stein was sitting at Putin’s table right with General Flynn.

Malcolm Nance: Jill Stein has a show on Russia Today.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein doesn’t have a show at all, let alone on RT. She once attended a function hosted by RT, which, by our current standards of liberal discourse, makes her a Kremlin agent, but the fact that such a demonstrably false statement could be made on cable news to thousands of people without anyone bothering to correct it shows how easy Russia panic is to stoke.

snip==================================================================

Earlier in the segment, Nance made the claim that “someone” in Trump’s campaign “may” be an “agent of Russia,” citing a recent report in the Financial Times (8/19/16) alleging that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s former translator “may” have “links” to Russian intelligence.

The irony, of course, is that Nance himself has far more recent and better documented ties to US intelligence, but MSNBC feels no need to convince viewers he is not a CIA plant spreading disinformation.

snip==================================================================

According to leading pro-Democratic media, the US cannot possibly work with Russia; they are fundamentally adversarial. This type of macho posturing, previously the domain of Fox News, has become increasingly commonplace as the Clinton camp drives home the talking point that Trump is a Kremlin agent.

The day before, in his segment “Does Putin Want Trump to Be President?,” Chris Matthews (8/19/16) allowed former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul to assert that, without a doubt, Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and leaked the info to get Trump elected. Despite the fact that the head of US intelligence, James Clapper, has asked the media to pump the brakes on making these claims without qualification, McFaul has his “sources,” so it becomes a matter of fact.

https://fair.org/home/stoking-russia-panic-for-partisan-gain-will-have-a-long-term-price-for-peace/

FAIR's stories on Russian manipulations on our election in 2016 election have largely served to advance the narrative that the alarm about Russian influence are largely an overblown reaction that allows corporate media to skirt any focus on its own troubling bias .

But FAIR was technically correct about Jill Stein not having a program on RT.

Caveat lector.

[BlueWI]

34. Meh.

Technically correct? You mean correct?

A whole lotta whataboutism. You're going a long way back to find one story that's supposed to discredit the source. Why? WaPo and NYT helped March us off to Iraq. Are they forever discredited?

I like the WaPo overall, better than NYT and have subscribed a number of times. But the current article by FAIR was very specific about its concerns about the ownership structure and its patterns of coverage.

It's pretty obvious to me why FAIR focuses more on the bigger corporate media outlets. They are more prominent publicly and more influential over much of public opinion. The NYT calls itself the national paper of record. NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX are granted priority access to valuable public airwaves, with the Fairness Doctrine a trivia question at this point. To some extent FAIR is partisan but so is FOX News, though FOX's polling is constantly cited on DU and by Nate Silver. Partisan sources can sometimes present good journalistic content.

Your slam of FAIR is a fail, unwarranted criticism of a media oversight organization that has done good work for decades. It doesn't serve Democrats to discourage interest in its work.

[lapucelle]

37. Wait...what? FAIR missed the biggest story in a generation concerning propaganda as news.

It still discounts the the influence of Russian misinformation as much ado about nothing and it’s silent about both dark money in media and Russian corporate owned media that operates in the service of a corrupt government.

As long as FAIR remains studiously silent about those problems, I will take their implications that reliable, generally trustworthy journalism is suspect due simply to the conditions of its ownership under advisement only.

Those who rely on FAIR as bias confirmation should take a very close look at its work in the last five years. Its reliance on dog whistle terminology in its recent “technically accurate” headline just begins to scratch the surface.

Caveat lector.

[BlueWI]

42. Certainly Russian interference is a huge story

and I don't rely on any single source to get a story correct, not FAIR, not WaPo. Wouldn't make sense to do that. But it's reductive to define an organization solely on what they get wrong. Otherwise the WaPo's failure to do due diligence in the run up to the second Gulf War would disqualified them too from an assumption of competence. I complement the Post on some of the post-2016 investigative reporting on the Trump administration, albeit a bit behind the election cycle. But you're still going to get a predominantly white, upper class, avidly pro-capitalist perspective with the liberal-conservative binary overused as a framing device. It's the paper of record in an absurdly racially divided city that still doesn't have representation in the Senate.

So definitely, I like and sometimes subscribe to the WaPo. But there are plenty of instances where stories are missed even as well funded as that organization is, compared to a small nonprofit like FAIR. And the WaPo wasn't called untrustworthy just because of its owner - the evidence of problematic coverage is clearly presented. You've ignored this evidence in your responses in favor of a broad brush dismissal. Nothing wrong a counter argument that engages with the evidence, but the grand generalities are a fail and certainly don't do justice to the work that FAIR does.

[lapucelle]

43. Anyone concerned about WaPo's failure to do due diligence 15 years ago,

should probably be equally concerned about FAIR’s continued failure to engage in due diligence regarding what can only be described as outright ongoing propaganda by agents of a hostile foreign power masquerading as news sources.

Until FAIR addresses that issue, I will continue to ask why not.

Caveat lector.

[JoeOtterbein]

2. Thanks Uncle Joe!

Not only is the Post biased at times, at

other times they are just plain ridiculous. Like this from the above:

“An Exclusive Look at Jeff Bezos’ Plan to Set Up an Amazon-Like Delivery for ‘Future Human Settlement’ of the Moon,” with a picture looking up at a Bezos in shades gazing off proudly into the distance.)

[Uncle Joe]

8. I hear you JoeOtterbein.

I'm still wondering how long will it take CNN to post that interview from last night?

Peace to you.

[JoeOtterbein]

10. Still waiting for the CNN clip?

I'm getting curiouser and curiouser.

[Uncle Joe]

20. I have tried googling it every way I can think of.

"Bernie Sanders Anderson Cooper 360" "Bernie Sanders Anderson Cooper" "Bernie Sanders Anderson Cooper 8/15" "Bernie Sanders Anderson Cooper full interview."

The funny thing is Anderson Cooper's interview with Stephen Colbert which happened immediately after Bernie's interview was/is up on at least a half dozen sites including CNN's by the next morning.

It's as if Anderson's interview of Bernie two days ago never happened?

[JoeOtterbein]

22. Now that is weird.

Thanks for letting me know, Uncle Joe!

[Joe941]

31. Ya I've been looking for it too.

[George II]

11. Are you watching CNN's two-hour special report on Amazon?

[guillaumeb]

4. Recommended.

Nu surprise to find a strong bias for capitalists in the US conservative, corporate media.

Even here one can read stories praising Amazon for the supposed convenience it offers, while ignoring the very real economic harm Bezos is doing to the country and the economy.

[sharedvalues]

5. Still WaPo is the best paper we got

Better than the NYT.

I sub to the Post. Not the NYT.

[guillaumeb]

6. And that says a lot.

I subscribe to the Chicago Tribune.

At this point, it is more of a hometown paper than anything else. And the editorial stance is generally right wing.

In 2016, the Tribune recommended what they called a principled vote for Gary Johnston, the Libertarian.

[Uncle Joe]

7. If that's the case, the American People

are in deep shit and Trump will not be the last Trump.

[sharedvalues]

16. It's a fact

I recommend people read
The Atlantic. The New Yorker. Vox. Mother Jones.

But none is a traditional newspaper. The Post is the best newspaper today by far. Marty Baron has done a good job.

[LanternWaste]

39. Reading tea-leaves and chicken entrails is fun.

But is sometimes necessary to better advertise the narrative we want out there.

[Uncle Joe]

40. I wouldn't know about that but thanks for the tip.

[proActivist]

15. I subscribe to both. nt

[JudyM]

24. It's such a downward spiral. Our democracy appears to be being flushed down the toilet.

[guillaumeb]

25. Remember the blue wave in 2018.

And work toward another.

We know that participation is key. An involved and informed citizenry can elect the politicians we need, and apply pressure to those politicians if needed.

[JudyM]

26. .

keep hope alive. thanks for that, g.

[guillaumeb]

29. You are welcome. We must choose optimism. eom

[grantcart]

9. If it weren't for Jeff Bezos Sanders would be at 87% in the polls.

[SidDithers]

18. No. 114%....nt

Sid

[dchill]

12. K&R.

[zentrum]

13. Excellent Post. Thank you!

Bezo's speaks to the editors at WAPO once a week in long conversations.

[sharedvalues]

17. Hmmm

https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadline.com/2019/06/jeff-bezos-has-never-meddled-with-washington-post-coverage-editor-marty-baron-affirms-1202628210/am


Even when the editorial team covers Amazon or Bezos personally, Baron said, “He hasn’t interfered with a single story. He hasn’t suggested a story. He hasn’t squelched a story. He hasn’t critiqued a story, hasn’t criticized a story.”

Baron made the comments in a keynote appearance at the FT Future of News Summit in New York.

[msongs]

14. perhaps bernie could print his own newspaper with only good things about himself nt

[comradebillyboy]

23. He is, see the 'Bern Notice'

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/457458-sanders-campaign-to-launch-own-newsletter-with-scoops

Sanders campaign to launch own 'newsletter with scoops'

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign is launching its own newsletter filled with “scoops, insights and news nuggets” about the 2020 election.

The “Bern Notice” newsletter launch, announced by his campaign on Wednesday, follows the senator’s recent attacks on mainstream media and its coverage of his presidential campaign.

The “Bern Notice” digital newsletter will “have all sorts of goodies,” for readers, whether “you are a journalist, an activist or a news junkie,” the description said.

Here's the DU thread on the subject:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287241056

[reACTIONary]

19. Here is the conclusion of the fact check...

... and a link to the fact check itself.

We cut Sanders some slack earlier when he made an inequality comparison within the United States. But wealth is a fundamentally misleading measure if you're comparing countries across the globe. It's one thing to look at inequality inside a country, but international comparisons are in another realm and fraught with even more problems.

Without considering how debt is measured and held, what kinds of assets each group owns, or how the currencies are converted, it's hard to make heads or tails of what wealth actually means, with respect to people's daily lives around the globe. Moreover, negative wealth - which includes people with high standards of living - really drags down the bottom 50 percent. Sandars's statistic, while provocative, is basically meaningless. He earns Three Pinocchios.

The article includes responses to it from Sanders, Credit Suisse, Oxfam, and a link to a critique of the fact check by economist Dean Baker.

Some interesting points from this critique:

Since somewhere around a quarter of the world's population has zero wealth, if you have $1,000 in your bank account, you are wealthier than the bottom 25 percent of the world's population. This is not a good measure of inequality.

Also, as the piece points out, the world's poorest people by this measure are not those who are starving and homeless in the developing world, but rather recent graduates of Harvard med school and business school who took out large amounts of debt to pay for their education. I'm afraid I can't shed many tears for these folks.

However, this critique does take WaPo to task:

The Washington Post and its deficit hawk allies would go nuts over a $1 trillion increase in annual taxes, but they would have us altogether ignore the enormous loss in output as a result of economic policies they supported. By the standard applied to Sanders, this certainly should be a four Pinocchio offense.

[Hortensis]

21. I think some are mistakenly imputing bias to

behaviors that in being reported come across as lacking in integrity, blatantly contradicting stated beliefs, negative against other candidates far beyond what is considered normal for a Democratic primary, and other things that simply do not make a candidate sound good when reported.

It’s not bias when it’s true. There’s no way to report that makes him sound good, for instance, about his exploitation and underpayment of his field staff for many months and refusal to live up to his own stated standards, to the point that it became a national story.

If anything, didn’t they go far too easy on this, and many others? They reported on his creating a union to make lemonade out of his worker-rebellion lemon, but where was all the reporting when the union itself was used to continue refusing to pay the wages he claimed all should and that his own workers were fighting for?

How people see what reporting is done depends on how much they want to excuse in him and what standards those who have some feel all our candidates should meet.

[Skidmore]

35. I can think of only one other

candidate for whom I see social media comment section complain about coverage in this manner. And he's not a Democrat.

[Hortensis]

36. Not exactly the only similarity, either.

[Garrett78]

30. Regarding this whole Sanders and the media thing, here's the bottom line:

Sanders has received more neutral-positive coverage than almost every other candidate. He's also likely to receive more negative coverage than most candidates, because he's getting so much more coverage than most other candidates. He's the only candidate who ran last time and he's one of the most well-known because of that.

Peeps need to understand that name recognition is still the driving force at this juncture. And the size of the field is muddying the water, which makes it even less likely that your average voter is going to try and distinguish between candidates more than 5 months before voting begins. Not that your average voter would be paying a ton of attention at this point even if the field was much smaller.

[LanternWaste]

38. I certainly dig how you conflate evidence and editorial sampling of three orgs.

It would get tossed into the wastebasket in a freshman statistics class... but we all need to hold onto something, so I get it-- without the appropriate framing, the narrative of BS's oppression would become far too obvious as fiction.

[NYMinute]

41. fair.org

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Thank you for the laugh.