Table of Contests:
Rex Murphy: It was the Most Explosive Story of the Past Century. And the Media Got it Wrong: Rex Murphy, National Post, May 20, 2020
A Catastrophic Media Failure: Sean Davis, WSJ,Mar. 25, 2019
It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong: Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic, Mar. 24, 2020
Why the Western Media Keeps Getting North Korea Wrong: Se-Woong Koo, Al Jazeera, May 6, 2020
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Rex Murphy: It was the Most Explosive Story of the Past Century. And the Media Got it Wrong
Rex Murphy
National Post, May 20, 2020
The volume of sustained, emotive, one-dimensional reporting on the Trump collusion with Russia story has no parallel. It occupied every platform, from the smallest blog, to Twitter, Facebook, cable news, newspapers and mainstream broadcasters (in Canada as well as the U.S.), almost every day for nearly three whole years.
If it’s underlying premise was correct this was perfectly justified. For since the founding of the greatest republic in the world, the United States of America, there has never been such a charge brought against a sitting president — that he was an agent, an instrument of, a conspirator with the leader of its principal enemy. Such was the charge against Donald Trump. That he was a tool of Russia’s grim leader, Vladimir Putin, that Putin with sovereign deviousness had infected U.S. democracy, and with serpentine brilliance installed into the absolute highest office of the world’s most powerful country a pawn and a stooge.
This carried the corollary that Trump, by all and every standard, was the most conniving, greedy and utterly despicable human being ever to have exited the womb of an American mother. Compared with Trump, Benedict Arnold was a Boy Scout, Eagle class.
This, in full, was the premise of the Russian collusion story. It stirred a mass journalistic frenzy, and any contribution to its narrative, which even tendentiously supported that narrative, was ravenously picked up and breathlessly fed into the great journalistic machine.
And it was all garbage. Collusion was a delusion. A willing delusion, I would maintain. Willing because every bien pensant journalist felt not just driven, but authorized by his or her social, intellectual and moral superiority to the vulgar Donald Trump, to find and scatter every hint, rumour, leak and — in some cases — outright lies that could lead to his political and personal ruin.
All the journalists who bought into this fable, and they were the majority, were wrong. They were dead wrong. The collusion story has proven to be a hoax. It has collapsed. It is not just Monty Python’s famed dead parrot — (E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!) — it is a whole flock of dead parrots. It is as dead, as Dickens declared of Marley, as a door nail.
To put a cap on it, the establishment press and all its satellites got the biggest, most explosive story of the past century — Donald Trump was a Russian operative — wrong. It is the journalistic failure of our time. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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A Catastrophic Media Failure
Sean Davis
WSJ, Mar. 25, 2019
Robert Mueller’s investigation is over, but questions still abound. Not about collusion, Russian interference or obstruction of justice, but about the leading lights of journalism who managed to get the story so wrong, and for so long.
It wasn’t merely an error here or there. America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth during the presidential campaign to its final breath Sunday—and they never stopped congratulating themselves for it. Last year the New York Times and Washington Post shared a Pulitzer Prize “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.” A 2017 Time magazine cover depicted the White House getting a “makeover” to transform it into the Kremlin.
All based on a theory—that the president of the United States was a Russian asset—produced by a retired foreign spy whose work was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. An unbiased observer would have taken the theory’s partisan provenance as a red flag, but most political journalists saw nothing but green lights. No unverified rumor was too salacious and no anonymous tip was too outlandish to print. From CNN to the Times and the Post, from esteemed and experienced reporters to opinion writers and bloggers, everyone wanted a share of the Trump-treason beat. What good is the 21st-century Watergate if you don’t at least make an effort to cast yourself as the fearless journalist risking it all who got that one big tip that brought down a president?
Not only did the press fail to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency; it provided voluminous evidence for his repeated charge of “fake news.”
Take CNN. The network reported in December 2017 that Donald Trump Jr. received special email access to stolen documents before their public release by WikiLeaks—an accusation that, if true, could have proved the president’s inner circle was colluding with Russian hackers intent on taking down Mrs. Clinton. But it turned out “the most trusted name in news” misreported the dates on the unsolicited emails to the president’s son. They had been sent to him days after WikiLeaks had published the pilfered documents. CNN still hasn’t explained why it failed to do basic due diligence on such an important story.
Another CNN foul-up came in June 2017, the month after President Trump fired James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Trump said Mr. Comey had assured him three times that he wasn’t under FBI investigation. The network reported Mr. Comey would directly refute the president’s claim under oath. In reality, Mr. Comey’s own memos explicitly confirmed Mr. Trump’s statement. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong
Zeynep Tufekci
The Atlantic, Mar. 24, 2020
Many will be tempted to see the tragic coronavirus pandemic through a solely partisan lens: The Trump administration spectacularly failed in its response, by cutting funding from essential health services and research before the crisis, and later by denying its existence and its severity. Those are both true, but they don’t fully explain the current global crisis that has engulfed countries of varying political persuasions.
As it turns out, the reality-based, science-friendly communities and information sources many of us depend on also largely failed. We had time to prepare for this pandemic at the state, local, and household level, even if the government was terribly lagging, but we squandered it because of widespread asystemic thinking: the inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics. We faltered because of our failure to consider risk in its full context, especially when dealing with coupled risk—when multiple things can go wrong together. We were hampered by our inability to think about second- and third-order effects and by our susceptibility to scientism—the false comfort of assuming that numbers and percentages give us a solid empirical basis. We failed to understand that complex systems defy simplistic reductionism.
Widespread asystemic thinking may have cost America the entire month of February, and much of what we’d normally consider credible media were part of that failure.
On January 29, about a week after China’s government shifted from a deny-and-censor strategy to massive action and communication, Chinese scientists published a significant paper in The New England Journal of Medicine. The paper estimated the R0 (the basic reproduction number of an infectious disease) from the first known case of coronavirus in early December through January 4 to be little more than 2. That means that, left somewhat unchecked, each infected person infected two more people. Crucially, the paper pointed out evidence of mild and even asymptomatic cases, unlike SARS, which almost always came with a high fever. It also confirmed the reports that the disease was most dangerous for the elderly or people with underlying conditions. The paper came out just after China made the unprecedented move to shut down all of Wuhan, a metropolis of 10 million people, and also Hubei, a province of 50 million people. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Why the Western Media Keeps Getting North Korea Wrong
Se-Woong Koo
Al Jazeera, May 6, 2020
After 20 days of absence, proof of life for North Korea’s Kim Jong Un finally came on May 2. North Korean state media released images of the leader touring a fertiliser factory. Contrary to mounting speculation by much of the international media and many so-called North Korea watchers, Kim was clearly not on his deathbed.
Western journalists are not always adept at covering this reclusive country, but the latest fiasco surrounding Kim’s supposedly imminent demise proved just how eager they are to accept unconfirmed rumours as objective news and how poorly they judge information about North Korea.
It all started on April 20, when the North Korean-defector-run news site Daily NK published a story that Kim had undergone heart surgery. Initially citing multiple sources, the site claimed that the North Korean leader “suffered from inflammation of blood vessels involving the heart … but his condition worsened.”
Daily NK often relies on anonymous informers in the North to run critical articles about the regime, and its track record on accuracy is spotty at best. In this instance, the English version of the article was later edited to say “a cardiovascular procedure” instead of “a heart surgery”, and the editor ran a correction that there were no multiple sources, but only one.
Within hours, CNN put forward its own single-source piece, with the sensationalist headline, “US source: North Korean leader in grave danger after surgery.” MSNBC anchor Katy Tur tweeted to her more than 700,000 followers: “North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is brain dead, according to two US officials.” She called it a “CNN scoop” confirmed by NBC News.
CNN later revised its headline to “US monitoring intelligence that North Korean leader is in grave danger after surgery” and Tur apparently deleted her tweet, both conveying that the intel was less than credible. But the cat was already out of the bag. For the next 11 days all manner of news outlets and sites worldwide would join the game of guessing “Is Kim Jong Un really dead?” and “Who will be the next ruler of North Korea?”
So great was the noise generated by Western media that even the normally more reserved South Koreans became rattled, wondering if they had missed out on something, even though the country’s National Security Council maintained that “there are at present no unusual developments within North Korea”. At times “Kim Jong Un death” trumped even coronavirus in search rankings on major portal websites.
To be fair, the North Korean state contributed to the drama when Kim did not publicly pay respect to his grandfather Kim Il Sung on his April 15 birth anniversary for an unspecified reason. But in hindsight, there was not even a shred of concrete proof that Kim Jong Un’s health and the succession question merited serious discussion. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Terence Corcoran: Unfund the CBC, Canada’s Pravda and National Enforcer of Truth: Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, Jan. 22, 2020 — In the unctuous style of the four-anchor team at the CBC’s flagship evening news report, The National, two of the anchors — Adrienne Arsenault and Andrew Chang — for some time have been promoting their program on CBC radio with a short promotional commercial.
Chinese Officials, State Media Spin George Floyd Protests To Criticize Trump: Megan Henney, Fox News, June 1, 2020 –– Chinese officials and state media clobbered the Trump administration’s response to violent protests sweeping the U.S., comparing the widespread unrest that began last week to the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong.
SPECIAL REPORT: How China Covered Up the Coronavirus Crisis: Sky News, May 31, 2020 — The Chinese Communist Party’s brutal crackdown on critics during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak led to hundreds of people being taken from their families and held in secret detention indefinitely.
What the Death of Local News Means for the Federal Election: April Lindgren, The Walrus, Nov. 15, 2019 – Resignation and outrage colour veteran journalist Mary-Ann Barr’s voice as she reflects on the Red Deer Advocate and its coverage of the recent Alberta provincial election.
The State of Journalism 2019 How Journalists Find Their News, Use Social Media, and Work with PR Teams: Muck Rack — In this report, we seek to answer: How are journalists using social media? What’s the best way to pitch journalists? What is journalists’ outlook on the industry? How are media relationships changing?
