Eric Alternman - "Midterm Media Meltdown"
Nice piece from Eric Alternman that goes behind the corporate media's rightward turn of the electorate/return of "mainstream" Republicans narrative.
http://www.thenation.com/article/190505/midterm-media-meltdown#
One problem with the answers to the above is that they reside in phenomena that are complex and multifaceted, while our media insist on a narrative that is simple and straightforward. To be fair, some of the weaknesses of our system fall into the category of It was ever thus. Turnout is always anemic in midterms; the presidents party almost always loses in his sixth year. And while its true that Republican state legislatures have shamelessly gerrymandered their election maps to the partys advantage, the distribution of the population would likely ensure a Republican House majority anyway, given the way that conservatives spread themselves across the rural areas and liberals crowd themselves into the cities.
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Finally, the 2014 election coverage suffered even more than usual from the mainstream medias inability to admit the degree to which the Republican Party has been captured by a fringe element with an unshakable commitment to ideological fantasy. As Heather Digby Parton notes in Salon, Iowas new senator-elect, Joni Ernst, professes to believe in the fringe constitutional theory called nullification, has told audiences that shes ready to take up arms against the government, and thinks a 20-year-old U.N. resolution to encourage nations to use fewer resources called Agenda 21 is a threat to the American way of life. (A spokesperson has denied that Ernst supports nullification.) But as Norm Ornstein reports, The Washington Post almost completely ignored her nutty notions: A Nexis search shows that the Post has had four references to Ernst and Agenda 21all by Greg Sargent on his blog from the left, The Plum Line, and none on the news pages of the paper. Receiving far more coverage was her opponents argument with his neighbor over some chickens. The Times, too, made no mention of Agenda 21, but seven of the chickens. (On MSNBC, Luke Russerts issueless reporting explained Ernsts appeal with the assertion that she was trying to ride this popular charisma into statewide office.)
As Ornstein demonstrates, Ernst was hardly alone in benefitting from her bizarre beliefs being whitewashed for her by the mainstream media. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said in a telephone town hall: Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico, who have clearly shown theyre willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism. They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas. In this case, the Post did run a fact-check column by Glenn Kessler on Cottons assertion, but not a single news story. The Times made no mention of it whatever.
The whitewash was especially thick this year because the narrative of the night was that the Tea Party had been defeated and the GOP was back in the hands of its far more responsible establishment. In fact, much closer to the truth is that the lunatics are now running the asylum and, rather frighteningly, both houses of Congress.
BeyondGeography
(39,284 posts)What a fucking joke.
Critics? How is it that neither Gabriel nor his editors thought to interject into this nonsensical he said/she said exchange some actual evidence? Nowhere in this report of more than 1,200 words does the story mention the fact that in none of these states is voter fraud a genuine phenomenon. (If you wanted decent coverage of this issue, you would have had to rely on the reporting of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show rather than Gabriel and The New York Times.)
stupidicus
(2,570 posts)is one of the most stupid but effective ones the rightwingnuts ever came up with
Snotcicles
(9,089 posts)WillyT
(72,631 posts)"The Republicans say the Earth is flat.
The Democrats say it's spherical.
We Say... You decide."
There is a pronounced difference between... Neutral and Objective.
snot
(10,481 posts)I think we we see this kind of thing frequently. Bush says something stupid, the media try to massage it into something more sensible; but let a Dem say something that can be taken as off-base in any way, and it will be.
BumRushDaShow
(127,315 posts)Or better, let a Dem say something that is a FACT, and the media will completely twist it around and obfuscate it in order to make it sound off-base so they can continue to support the prevailing RW narrative.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)And has been since Limpballs came on the air. We'll know that we're on our way back as a nation when bad things start to happen to the propagandists and terrorists that saturate the airways.
Cha
(295,929 posts)corporatemediaWhoredom.
I got out in Nov 2002 and been waiting for the rest of those who are on to the goPropaganda Big Lie Machine to catch up.
Oh yeah, this would have been my tv back in the day had I kept watching.. now I don't even own one.. #1 b/c of money.. and I get to watch stuff from tv online.. so there, good.
Thank you, Eric Alterman and TomCA!
Droning Predator
(82 posts)Media's not worth a pitcher of warm piss.
Bill USA
(6,436 posts)then explain the election as a Republican "wave" election;
But if you look more closely at some of the contradictions underlying those results, then you suddenly have what Ricky Ricardo used to call some splainin to do. How is it that four states that gave victories to Republican Senate candidates also happened to approve ballot initiatives calling for an increase in the minimum wage? And how is it that this election ended in a GOP sweep, even as Americans, according to The Washington Posts Zachary Goldfarb, routinely told pollsters that they share the Democrats views not only on the minimum wage, but on virtually every issue across the board: raising taxes on the wealthy, addressing global warming, repairing (rather than repealing) Obamacare, supporting same-sex marriage, you name it?
Election 2014: The GOP's war on Obama works, or: sabotage and proclaim: "Look he can't get it done!"