Quote:
Originally Posted by whell
The theme after the election, even on election night as it started to dawn on the MSM that they totally got it wrong, was that they need to get there asses out - away from their hideouts in the east and the west coasts - and start trying to figure out what the rest of the country thinks. Even Baquet at the NY Times said:
“If I have a mea culpa for journalists and journalism, it’s that we’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than the people we talk to — especially if you happen to be a New York-based news organization — and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”
The NBC anchor Tom Brokaw echoed that sentiment, lamenting that for all its efforts at advancing diversity, the news media was still “pretty confined” to “the Eastern Seaboard.”
So, yeah, I agree with Baquet and Brokaw on this one - your smarmy comment not withstanding - that the NY Times and the rest of the MSM have a very narrow perspective that tends to reflect only half - or less than half - of what the rest of the county thinks. They need to fix that, regardless of how that might upset your little tea cart.  |
I complete agree with the above assessment. I read the NYTimes, WashPost, Economist, WSJournal, Breitbart, Washington Times, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, the Guardian, Reuters and watch PBS, BBC, and CNN, MSNBC and Fox News and even listen to some talk radio. However, I know full well what I'm getting from each of them. Each had its own ideological bent and different degrees of credibility & journalistic integrity (with FoxNews, Breitbart and talk radio occupying the lowest rungs IMO).
I use my own filter, something that you also ascribe to doing. Buzzfeed's release of the dossier was of debatable ethics, to be sure. However, I don't expect particularly high ethics from them, just as I don't expect particularly high ethics from WikiLeaks who released material almost certainly stolen by Russian security services with the intent of interfering with the election (and something you had no qualms about. You even praised the exposure of material thereby attained).
While what Buzzfeed did was debatably ethical (unlike the unquestionably illegal activities of Wikileaks/Russia), what CNN (and everybody else since) did was completely ethical and newsworthy. They reported
the fact that the Intelligence Community (and much of Washington, including the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee) knew of a laundry list of possible compromises of Trump by Russian intelligence and saw it as important enough to brief Trump and Obama on.
You may not like the
fact that a respected, retired MI6 investigator (he was behind the successful corruption investigation of FIFA and had considerable experience in Russia) produced this dossier for the Republican (and later the Democratic) Party, but he did and a lot of people found it troubling enough to brief Trump and Obama about it. The
fact that the details of the report are unverified is relevant and was reported as such, as was the
fact that it was deemed important enough to include in a briefing to the POTUS and the POTUS-elect.
Yer boy, der Trumpenfuhrer, needs to get the Putin stink off of him as quickly as he can. His handling of all matters Russian, including the handling of this story, doesn't help.