NPR's On The Media: "Normalize This!" - examines how to report on a PEOTUS who regularly lies

[SticksnStones]

A very interesting listen...there are journalists out there who really do get it!

DECEMBER 2, 2016
Normalize This!
We devote this hour to a question put to us pretty much daily since election day: How to cover President Trump? First, we ask the AP, Univision, NPR, USA Today, and other news outlets about how they are defining a relationship with a president-elect who flaunts traditional rules, spreads misinformation, and criticizes the press. Then we turn to language. Listeners help us highlight moments in media coverage that obscure the truth, and journalist Masha Gessen warns of the "impulse to normalize." Plus, linguist John McWhorter describes the phenomenon of partisan words, and cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues that the principles of journalism need to be redefined... because of how our brains work.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2016-12-02/

[marybourg]

1. On the media mistakes flaunts for flouts?

I guess that's the end for the verb "flout" and the beginning of 2 disparate definitions for "flaunt." That's how language changes, I've been told.

[SticksnStones]

4. Good catch...one I certainly overlooked. nt

[wiggs]

2. Since the election, NPR has been very good with substantive analysis of what might happen over

the next four years.

[n2doc]

5. They've also been cheerleading for Trump

Especially on the so-called- jobs savior crap. Breathless reporting on how grateful the minions are that tRump kept his promise.

No mention of the costs, or the jobs that are going to be shipped out under the agreement. NPR is not our friend.

[rurallib]

6. must have missed it

I hear an occasional story slightly critical of Trump.
But I have mostly turned NPR off with their terrible election coverage.

[JudyM]

3. Everyone on DU would find this a worthwhile listen! Particularly the last one, on how our brains

unconsciously absorb concepts and their repetition leads us to believe, and how the media needs to take a different approach.

Thanks for posting!

[90-percent]

7. "cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues that the principles of journalism need to be redefined"

I think our long established principles of journalism are just fine. The root problem is that 90% of American MSM is controlled by six for profit corporations. They don't give a rat's ass about "journalism - how quaint"', they're into catapulting the propaganda and mass manipulation of the population so as to turn them in to ever more obedient consumers just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and dumb enough not to realize the system threw them overboard thirty years ago.

Our media simply lies to us so much we've all succumbed to massive BIG LIES, which we have been conditioned to view as CONVENTIONAL WISDOM.

-90& Jimmy

[heaven05]

8. well NPR

trying to find some progressive chops again, or this just might be a flash in the pan and it will be business as usual as has been since the shrubs Iraq war debacle..

[Ernesto]

9. "On the Media" is my.....

weekly NPR must listen show!

[teamster633]

14. Agreed. They always provide a rational analysis of the week's news.

If NPR would just dump Steve Inskeep and Scott Simon they would be mostly bearable...if still a little too tilted to the right for my tastes...as noted..."fairness" and all.

[Cryptoad]

10. NPR has become,,,

a GOP Rag. no longer listen to their broadcast.

[marybourg]

13. Well, they're not DU;

they try to air all sides. I don't always want to hear all sides. I want to hear my side, so sometimes I turn them off when someone is voicing their side. The worst that can honestly be said about them is that they do bend over backwards to be "fair" to the right.

But they're very far from a GOP mouthpiece. There's nothing else on the air that matches their quality. I think they deserve my support and criticism. Both of which I give them.

[jack69]

17. Their Board of Control

has been taken over by the right.

[shadowmayor]

11. Alt Media

Just as the racists and supremacists seek a more mainstream acceptance through terms like alt right and super patriots and oath keepers, calling what we have in this country the generic "media" is a misnomer. Ray McGovern has rightly called them the Fawning Corporate Media. And if you think that NPR is doing just fine, you've missed the moving of the "football" to the right side of the field over the last 40 years. The mainstream media has, as a whole, never been very good to begin with.

[SticksnStones]

15. You know the expression throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

To devalue all reporting with a broad brush stroke seems to me to play right in to the right wing narrative that all media is the same and none is trustworthy.

I don't buy into that. I think you have to carefully cultivate your trusted news sources.

To say NPR is no longer trusted....well, does that include Terry Gross of Fresh Air? Does that include RadioLab or the work of Ira Glass, Diane Rehm?

On The Media is a weekly program that specifically looks at the actions of the media.

How can one dismiss that effort outright?

[shadowmayor]

16. There are selected portions

NPR does have its good moments. But it's all being brought to us by Koch Bros. and Archer-Daniels etc. The un-funding was by design and the corporate tentacles have worked their way into the marrow of NPR. When's the last you heard of Fukushima on NPR? That's just one glaring example. As Jim Hightower used to crow - tell me about Doug Jones (average American working two part-time jobs, wife is laid off and the kids need braces for their teeth), because the average American could give two hoots in hell about Dow Jones. Listening to Brooks and EJ on Friday afternoons is just another "fair and balanced" nightmare unleashed by Faux Noise and copied by all the rest. Brooks can choke on a turd for all I care, and I don't think his views should be on NPR as they're ridiculous. How about Hewitt on MSNBC? Another Charlie Rose interview with Kissinger or Larry Summers? Puhleeze. Yes our media has declined, and no it was never as elevated as were taught to believe.

[Paladin]

12. "impulse to normalize"

Such a charitable term for the way the MSM rolled over and played dead with regard to the worst presidential candidate in this country's history. Unforgivable dereliction of responsibility, cutting such a wide swath of slack to a president-elect who is now wiping his ass on a daily basis with the First Amendment.