Media Coverage of Anti-Semitism, Racism Rise in Trump Era
Kalev Leetaru
RealClearPolitics, July 20, 2019
President Trump generated an uproar this week with his widely condemned comments regarding four Democratic lawmakers of color, coupled with a campaign rally in which attendees chanted “Send her back!” in reference to Rep. Ilhan Omar. A closer look at media coverage of the congresswoman’s own anti-Semitic comments earlier this year raises the question of whether the current uproar will pass with as little long-term impact. Answering that may hinge on whether the media finds a new Trump angle to focus on.
Looking back over the past decade, the timeline below shows the percentage of airtime by month on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News that mentioned “racism” or “racist” using data from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive processed by the GDELT Project. From September 2010 to May 2013 there was a marked silent period in which mentions of racism largely disappeared from all three news channels. The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin in July 2013 appears to have restarted the national conversation around race. This week’s remarks by Trump appear to have sparked the most attention to the topic of the past decade.
Notably, there does not appear to be any meaningful change in mentions of racism between Obama and Trump’s presidencies. In contrast, coverage of anti-Semitism does appear to have increased sharply during Trump’s term. The timeline below shows coverage over the past decade that mentioned the words “anti-Semitism” or “anti-Semitic” or “antisemitism” or “antisemitic.”
The topic attracted almost no attention during Obama’s presidency, but has received several bursts of coverage since Trump’s July 2016 “Star of David” Clinton tweet first prompted accusations of anti-Semitism. Interestingly, Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitic tweets in March 2019 received far less attention, with Fox News covering them more than CNN and MSNBC combined.
In each case, the story faded within a week. Looking at the broader topic of discrimination, the timelinebelowshows coverage mentioning “discrimination” or “discriminatory” or “discriminated” or “discriminating.” Beginning July 2015, the month after Trump declared his candidacy, coverage of discrimination largely disappeared from all three channels and has remained far below Obama-era levels through the present. It is unclear what may be driving this shift, since anti-Semitism coverage has increased, but coverage of racism remains unchanged.
One possibility is that the stations have devoted so much of their airtime to Trump over the past four years, with just over 9% of their total airtime mentioning his name thus far this month. Looking more closely at the timeline above, the fact that Trump’s media profile has been steadily shrinking could also help explain his attack on the four Democrats. Trump has a long history of adopting controversial and media-genic stances in periods of declining media coverage as a way to boost attention.
Putting this all together, it is likely that just as Omar’s anti-Semitic remarks this past March faded from interest within a week, so too will the media move on from Trump’s remarks this week.
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Rex Murphy: Time is wrong. Today’s journalists Are Not ‘Guardians of the Truth’
Rex Murphy
National Post, Dec. 28, 2018
Time, that tattered, shrunken revenant of a once-popular news magazine, continues in its endless decline to delude itself that it has either the authority or the competence to name the “Person of the Year.” Brilliantly it named journalists — “The Guardians” — as 2018’s collective heroes, with Jamal Khashoggi given pride of place on the once-iconic cover. Time neglected to check on Khashoggi and now finds that it nominated a Qatar stooge, whose columns were midwifed by officers in the Qatar government, and whose “journalistic” career was but a distracting pendant to his many more serious activities, latterly as an anti-Saudi lobbyist, nephew to the one-time world’s biggest arms dealer, and a host of other shadowy mésalliances. The neatest summary I have read of Khashoggi, the journalist, is: “a highly-partisan operative who worked with a handler to publish propaganda at the behest of the Emirate of Qatar … in other words, an agent of influence.”
As far as journalists collectively being honoured with the ascription “guardians,” that surely cannot apply in North America or Europe if we take most of their coverage of Donald Trump as the testing ground. Trump journalism will someday earn its place in medical literature, side by side with malarial fever and LSD as engines of hallucination and fitful nightmares.
Throw in the scandal saga of Der Spiegel, whose star investigative reporter, Claas Relotius, has been proven to be an industrial-scale fraud, a fantasist fictionist, who gulled Der Spiegel and its readers for years, and is now the face for “fake news” worldwide, and ask again how journalists could even be considered the heroes of 2018? The Relotius problem was correctly described in a Facebook post as “a product of an absurdly leftist writers’ fraternity that is increasingly seldom prepared to leave its own convenient moral comfort zone in favour of the facts.”
Journalism is frequently as wayward as the social media it ritually deplores, propelled by a lust-like drive to the parts of a story that accord with its prejudices and predispositions. It has long since replaced the attempt to be objective with a commitment to activism and advocacy. Much of contemporary journalism does not report on the game. It sees itself as part of the game — it seeks to massage opinion, reinforce favoured perspectives, take down its “enemies” and shield its heroes.
There is an old word, not seen much in modern writing, quite possibly in near full decay from lack of use. Which is a shame for it still remains possibly the only full semantic vehicle for certain phenomena. The word is incompossible, and its meaning (taken here from the Oxford English Dictionary) is: adj. – Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both. To illustrate the meaning, I offer a few sentences: Environmentalism and journalism are incompossible. Hatred of and contempt for Donald Trump and honest reporting on him are incompossible.
Place the adjective environmental to govern the noun journalism and the former swallows up, nullifies, extinguishes quite the latter. What we may call real journalists on the global warming file are, to use a familiar category, on the very sharp end of the endangered species list. The majority of environmental journalists are a choir in perfect harmony on a one-note score, the settled-science symphony of the IPCC and Al Gore. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Is Brian Stelter a Deranged Homicidal Pedophile?
Karl Notturno
American Greatness, Mar. 25th, 2019
Probably not. But how can we really know for sure?
After two years of hype by a captivated and deranged media, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged campaign “collusion” with the Russians was completed and the Justice Department’s initial summary of the report was released over the weekend. And surprise! It was a complete dud.
And now we will have to listen to the corporate leftist media explain why they weren’t really wrong about anything and how they actually did good journalistic work. CNN’s Stelter noted that while political commentators did repeatedly allege Russian collusion on the “rolling talk show” of cable, the supposedly objective journalists were only asking questions about it. “There is a giant difference between asking and telling,” Stelter said on Sunday’s edition of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
But there are, of course, plenty of questions the corporate big media shills aren’t asking. For instance: is it possible that Brian Stelter is a homicidal pedophile who has systematically targeted, kidnapped, raped, and killed more than two-dozen children on a private island in the Caribbean?
If there is any chance at all—if there are any moments in Stelter’s life that he cannot perfectly account for—doesn’t the magnitude of damage implied in ignoring such a possibility warrant a $30 million investigation, employing dozens of lawyers and FBI agents, dragging a fine-tooth comb through his life and indicting several of his associates on unrelated crimes to put added pressure on them to testify against him?
Remember, we are just asking questions about a prominent public person who potentially could be a serial child rapist and murderer here. Once again, we’re just asking the questions that the American people need to have answered.
We should ask legal experts and political pundits their opinions of what should happen if any allegations concerning Brian Stelter are true. Perhaps we should interview a homicide detective and have him speculate on the grisly details of how exactly (if the allegations are true) he may have used a chainsaw to dismember the poor children. Next, perhaps a psychiatrist should be consulted to suggest what conditions might cause Stelter to have such an allegedly insatiable bloodlust. After all, Stelter himself told us that speculation “helps open our eyes and our minds to what’s possible.”
Of course, we have to “distinguish between what has actually happened and what might happen,” but isn’t it possible that a deep-cover sting operation might—at this very moment—be collecting evidence to implicate Brian Stelter in a worldwide ring of pedophiles who practice occult ceremonies with the blood of children and rabid tabby cats? What charges might Stelter face, if this is the case (which it may or may not be, but it’s just a question, right)? And if it ends up being true that Brian Stelter exsanguinates children and cute kittens, what are the potential ramifications on his family life? Perhaps we should send an investigative team to go ask his wife about the possibility that her husband takes a sick pleasure in seeing the life drain from a helpless Peruvian boy’s eyes.
Oh, and has Stelter released his tax returns yet? As a public figure who has the awesome responsibility of reporting the news, shouldn’t we know about his conflicts of interest, if any? Isn’t it possible that the pedophile ring is paying him off for his silence? Could it be that he is indoctrinating his viewers for cold hard cash? Shouldn’t he just release his returns so that we can take a look at them and make sure that there’s nothing illegal going on? After all, there is a chance that the IRS missed something . . . right? … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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