Jophiel wrote:
The media was looking into Edwards but they didn't have any reliable evidence yet and were, unsurprisingly, unwilling to accuse a candidate of infidelity without being able to back it up.
They went well beyond merely avoiding covering the story. They actively derided the Enquirer for running it. They did everything in their power to make people not believe the story, and to get the Enquirer to stop investigating it. They spent far far more time telling people the story was blatantly false (ok, interviewing people who said it was false, which is more or less the same thing) than they did checking to see if it was true. Willful ignorance at best, outright covering for a politician on their "side" at worst. It was pretty darn disgraceful in any case. I get not going to press until you have the facts, but when you chose not to investigate to find any facts? That's a whole different thing. And, again, many media outlets didn't just stop there.
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Wright was a non-story even when it happened. Out of 20+ years, all anyone could turn up was a single video (despite the church recording and selling copies of all his sermons) with a couple 'scary' pull quotes which were a lot less scary when in context of his entire sermon. The reason why it quickly faded and had no impact wasn't because CNN was suppressing the story, it's because there was barely a story there. I liked the crying about "What if it was a WHITE pastor...?!" though.
Shouldn't that be a relevant contrast to make though? In a society where we're supposed to treat people equally regardless of skin color, this would seem to be a pretty remarkable double standard. And the fact (which I mentioned) that Obama's behavior while in office in this area reflected the negative connotations of Wright's teachings should be the hint that this was a big issue, and should have been more thoroughly examined, but was not. I get that people are uncomfortable with the idea of black racism, but isn't that what public discourse should be about?
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Trump got bashed multiple times in this election for merely failing to reject some random racist's endorsement quickly enough.
Not a single story of which had traction for longer than a day. Same reason: there really wasn't any story there of longer than 24hr interest.
Uh huh. But the message was repeated over and over through the campaign. It's hard to read any liberal blog talking about Trump that wont toss the label "racist" in there. Where do you suppose this idea came from? Certainly not from his actual actions in his life. It was constructed out of whole cloth by the media picking up and repeating unfounded allegations. Again, on the one hand we have a candidate who spent 20 years in a church that openly endorsed "blackness" and rejection of the white man's world, and it's a one weekend story, while on the other we have a candidate who... um... once 40 years ago settled a more or less nuisance lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in hotel he happened to own, but almost certainly had no influence over its day to day operation (certainly, he wasn't working the front desk and falsely telling black folks that they didn't have any vacancies or whatever).
There's literally zero equivalence between those, but Trump is the one called a racist over and over, while Obama (ironically) wins a Nobel Peace Prize for winning an election while black. Seriously? You don't think there's something strange going on here? I think Trump's a silly, self interested, self important, and self entitled man. I don't think he's a racist. I don't think he's a bigot. I see zero evidence that he actually treats people differently professionally based on their skin color or gender. In fact, he has a track record showing the exact opposite is true. On the flip side, Obama on several occasions did take actions that were directly racially biased. And did so unapologetically because he knows that in our social environment, he could get away with it.
And IMO, that's the real problem. And yes, at least part of this has to do with how our media covers stories, and how it frames narratives.
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So yeah. There's a reason why a lot of people put very little stock in the accuracy and fairness of our media
There is. Because you go into it with a preconceived notion that (in this case) Obama must be a bad guy and when the media isn't reinforcing what you already believe, you convince yourself that it must be because the media is lying rather than admit that your notion was wrong.
No. I look at actions taken and assess them, and then note that the media very consistently makes radically different assessments, even of the same or very similar actions, based almost entirely on the identity or political alignment of the people involved. It's not like this is even a hard pattern to spot Joph. It's not just about Obama. He's one example of many.
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That your two big examples are from nine years ago is pretty telling though.
Two examples that over time have been examined sufficiently for there (in theory at least) to be little argument that they represent media bias. I could literally write pages of examples just about Hillary Clinton and how the media has whitewashed her actions, behavior, and words in this election cycle alone. We could talk about how the media
right now is still running full tilt with the whole "Russians ate my election" story. See. How you cover a story goes a long way towards how people interpret the story, and which "side" they agree with after reading about it. We've got tons of Democratic politicians and pundits screaming about Russian hacking. Does the media downplay this, call them sore losers, make it clear to the reader that there's no evidence to support the claims, etc, etc, etc (you know, like they're doing with the opposite bit about illegals voting). Nope. It's "reported" with a straight face, as though they're reporting on how the police caught a criminal.
If it were Republicans calling foul, do you honestly think the media would report it the same way? Again, we have that very response already. Let's just compare
these two articles, both in CNNs politics section. Notice how one of them just reports what's happening, what's being claimed, etc, while taking no position on it? Notice how the other kinda takes a position right in the freaking headline?
That's not objective reporting. It's not remotely close to objective reporting.
Edited, Dec 14th 2016 7:45pm by gbaji