SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2023
Everything all at once: We're happy to praise Nicolle Wallace for something she wisely chose to air on yesterday's Deadline: White House.
As was completely appropriate, Wallace spent the bulk of her two hours discussing the new revelations concerning the inner workings of Fox News.
More specifically, a legal filing by Dominion Voter Systems had revealed a wealth of text messages between major figures at Fox—text messages dating all the way back to November 2020.
In the texts, these major figures discussed the craziness of the claim—or at least, the craziness of some of the claims—that the 2020 election had been stolen from the incumbent, Donald J. Trump.
Major players at Fox News knew that several specific claims were crazy. Therein lay the new revelation about the ways of Fox.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, the craziest claims about Dominion Voting Systems were coming from Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump's more visibly unhinged lawyers. At one point, the Dominion legal filing describes this private, text message exchange about Powell and her claims:
DOMINION LEGAL FILING: By November 18, Carlson told Ingraham “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson replied, “It's unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it."
According to the legal filing, so went the private messaging inside Fox, 15 days post-election.
Assuming the legal filing is fundamentally accurate, it offers a jaw-dropping look at what major players were saying and thinking inside the castle at Fox. At that time, Carlson was saying that Powell's claims were "insane," and that he found her promulgation of those claims to be "unbelievably offensive."
For ourselves, we have no difficulty believing that that's what Carlson actually thought and felt at that time. Up jumped Wallace on yesterday's program, playing videotape of the way Carlson had chosen to open his Fox News show this very Thursday night:
CARLSON (2/16/23): Good evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight!
We haven't taken a poll, but it's possible, on this Thursday evening, you may be wondering what the hell is going on in our country.
There are so many unanswered questions―some of them lingering. How, for example, did senile hermit Joe Biden get 15 million more votes than his former boss, rock star crowd surfer Barack Obama?
Results like that would seem to defy the laws of known physics and qualify instead as a miracle. Was the 2020 election a miracle? Honestly, we don’t know and we don’t expect to get an answer to it tonight.
Lomg story short:
Ignore the puerile insults which now litter this fellow's work. (Later that night, he described Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer as "a low-IQ plastic surgery disaster," to cite just one more example.)
Ignore the disordered insults! As Wallace noted, Carlson was still suggesting, this Thursday night, that something was fishy about the 2020 election—that the official results of that election don't seem to make any sense.
Over at Fox, the disordered fellow lives in a world of puerile insult—and he continues to float the suggestion that the White House election was stolen.
The apparent contradiction with what he said in November 2020 can surely be explained away. (Sidney's Powell's "insane" claims aren't the only claims which can be made about that election.)
That said, Carlson is still on the air every night, suggesting that something about that election's official outcome defies simple common sense. Puerile insults are thrown in the stew to pander to the same viewers on whose behalf he took offense back in the reign of the crackpot Powell.
"You may be wondering what the hell is going on in our country," Carlson said this Thursday night. Part of "what is going on," of course, is this behavior by Carlson.
Alas! Marvin Gaye is no longer here to explain "What's Going On." Also this:
Wallace's program rarely expends any energy wondering how our own blue tribe can bring the news of Carlson's disorder to the attention of persuadable red tribe voters.
At present, our blue and red tribes live inside their own separate bubbles; very rarely the twain shall meet. Dueling propaganda mills now operate twenty-four hours a day. That has produced a high-speed, profit-based, round-the-clock train wreck which will be quite hard to resolve.
Within this discouraging state of affairs, all hail Feiler faster! In Thursday's report—it seems like a hundred years ago—we recalled the prescient thesis which was named by Mickey Kaus back at the turn of the century:
Feiler faster thesis
The Feiler faster thesis (FFT) is a thesis, or supported argument, in modern journalism that suggests that the increasing pace of society is matched by (and perhaps driven by) journalists' ability to report events and the public's desire for more information.
The idea is credited to Bruce Feiler and first defined by Mickey Kaus in a February 24, 2000 Kausfiles blog post...In an article published two weeks later, on March 9, 2000, Kaus gave the theory the name "Feiler faster thesis."
[...]
Kaus's second interpretation in a later article is broader and more succinct:
The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc.
Indeed! Thanks to all those new media, "the news cycle is much faster these days."
Also, within that high-speed news cycle, "a metastasized pundit caste" really is "constantly searching for new angles, etc." Also, that metastasized pundit caste is increasingly partisan / tribal.
Plus, the rewards are too damn high! Tons of money are being made as that metastasized pundit caste pushes tribally segregated accounts of a fast-moving string of controversies. Faster and faster and faster and faster, disputes arise, one after the other, as do the dueling tribal accounts of those endless disputes.
The legal filing by Dominion gives us a remarkable look inside one "cable news" channel. We'd love to see what sorts of messaging may or may not occur within our own blue cable channel—a channel which also works to give us viewers the types of food product we want.
(See quote from Michelle Goldberg below.)
That said, the rush of events in this past week brought the wisdom of "Feiler faster" into very clear view. Consider:
On Monday, a news report in the New York Times heightened the focus on the way the College Board adjusted the original framework of its Advanced Placement course in African American studies.
A wide range of difficult questions are involved in this important topic. The difficulty is compounded by the polarization of the journalistic culture—by the way our dueling tribes will assure their respective populations that Only Our Own Instinctive Views Are Defensible, Moral, Correct.
Especially in this high-speed, highly polarized world, it would be very hard to create a sensible discussion of the questions involved in the design of the College Board's AP course. But then, mid-week, it happened again!
All of a sudden, a new arrival on the front became the topic of general conversation. We refer to the highly-charged discussion of various issues in the realm of transgender rights.
Please don't make us link to the essays and public statements which suddenly shoved the College Board aside in favor of this new arrival. You could possibly start with this essay at Slate, then click a few of the links which you'll find therein.
Especially in this high-speed, highly polarized world, it would be very difficult to create a sensible discussion of the various important questions involved here. But then, on Thursday night, along came that legal filing from Dominion, and the fight about transgender issues had suddenly been supplanted at the front of the stage.
In this high-speed journalistic world, new arrivals on the front keep appearing day after day. Beyond that, the "democratization of media" produced by the Internet means that any subgroup can state its particular case. No journalistic platform required!
In theory, the democratization of media is a very good development. In practice, it's everything everywhere all at once, just in the course of one week!
Given the profit-driven partisanship of many of our media entities, conflicting claims would be extremely hard to resolve, even in the fullness of time. When it's everything suddenly all at once, it becomes impossible to produce anything which even resembles basic clarity, let alone consensus, concerning the basic facts and the basic logic of any particular topic.
As a general matter, Wallace strikes us as being perhaps a tiny bit demagogue adjacent, if only as a matter of instinct. This doesn't mean that she's a "bad person," because she surely isn't.
It does mean that she's quite limited as a journalist. Others may know what our blue tribe needs, but she seems to know what we want.
Yesterday, Wallace provided a valuable service, alerting us to the way Carlson opened Thursday night's program. Left unaddressed was that same old question:
In the high-speed rush of highly emotional tribal disputes, is there any way that our blue tribe can peel voters away from Carlson's legion of viewers?
Back in November 2020, Carlson said that Powell's lunacy was "unbelievably offensive." "Our viewers are good people," he said, "and they believe" what Powell is saying.
Fox viewers still don't know that they're being misled by the gruel Carlson ladles. Somewhat similarly, it may not occur to our own tribe's viewers that we seldom hear "a discouraging word" on our own tribe's cable news programs.
Our own tribe's viewers will never see John McWhorter on their favorite programs. Next week, we'll examine some of things he and many others have said about the College Board's AP course, including the things we may not be allowed to hear on our tribe's favorite programs.
Our own tribe's favorite TV shows are profit-based entities too! The hosts are paid enormous sums to keep us watching. (We aren't allowed to know how much.)
Our own tribe's shows are profit-based entities. Can it be that we're being misled, mistreated and underfed too, not unlike Carlson's viewers?
Free the John McWhorter One! Why is it that we never see him, and who knows what others, on our favorite shows?
Not that there's anything right with it: In this morning's New York Times, Michelle Goldberg pens an excellent column about the Fox reveal.
Along the way, she offers this. She could have named a lot more topics our tribe won't hears about:
GOLDBERG (2/18/23): It’s certainly true that all cable news shows program with ratings in mind. MSNBC—where, full disclosure, I’m a contributor — pays much closer attention to various Trump scandals than to climate change or the war in Ukraine because it’s catering to its audience. But there is no analogue for the way Fox treats its viewers.
In addition to MSNBC, in the past I’ve appeared a number of times on CNN. Sometimes hosts are a little saltier when the cameras aren’t rolling, but I don’t recall ever hearing any daylight between the views they express on-air and off. Fox News is unique in its bad faith.
They keep serving our favorite food: Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail!
We're inclined to agree that Fox is the worst. But the other two channels address our own tribe. For that reason, we're the ones they're dumbing down in search of ratings and profit!
ReplyDeletetl;dr
"In the texts, these major figures discussed the craziness of the claim—or at least, the craziness of some of the claims—that the 2020 election had been stolen from the incumbent, Donald J. Trump. "
C'mon, dear Bob, there's no doubt, no controversy anymore about the 2020 election being fraudulently interfered with, on a massive scale.
The laptop, remember? The censorship? The letter signed by 51 former 'intelligence' officers? The ban on signature-matching? 2000 mules? Etc, etc, etc.
As for the alleged text messages, that's just silly. A lawyer is lying? Whoa, what a earth-shattering scandal.
...y'know: like "dog bites a man"...
It's hard to follow your logic. Lawyers are allowed to lie but former intelligence officials are not?
DeleteThe notion that Bob is being paid to spin hard right, while idiot child Mao is in charge of keeping an eye on him, and payment is involved, would now have to be considered a circumstance backed by strong circumstantial evidence.
DeleteMao, everyone knows there was massive fraud in the 2020 election, with tens of millions of dead people voting for Trump, and MAGA loving CIA agents orchestrating massive ballot stuffing with fake Trump votes. In no way in the physical universe could such a total zero realize more than 22% of the actual vote. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.
DeleteAre you being sarcastic AC/MA? If you believe this, that puts to rest the claim that you have ever been any kind of Democrat or attorney.
DeleteIt should be fairly obvious to any thinking person that votes for Biden were votes against Trump to keep him out of office again. It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks he is a zero or senile or less charismatic than Obama. Biden's strength is that he is not Trump.
Given that there are slightly more Democrats than Republicans and that Independents skewed toward Biden not Trump in the last election, and Independents outnumber Republicans and Democrats, your figure of 22% is ridiculously low. And don't forget that the Democrats won the popular vote in 2016. Why wouldn't they do that again, in the face of Trump's many failures as president?
I wouldn't be surprised if Fox viewers engaged in the kind of fact-free reasoning you display, but calling Biden a zero doesn't change anything about the facts of the last election.
Pew says 33% were Democrats in 2020, 29% Republican, 34% Independent. Those leaning Democrat were 49% and those leaning Republican were 44%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-by-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/
If you assess election outcomes based on the views of people you associate with, it is possible to come away with a very skewed perception of who supports who.
anon 4:07, sarcasm, satire, something like that.
DeletePerhaps this is a quibble. Bob wrote:
ReplyDelete"Major players at Fox News knew that several specific claims were crazy."
Actually these Fox News folks believed that the election had not been stolen. They didn't know it.
Ahh. The old “were not liars, we’re gullible morons who believe any fact-free statement people make” defense.
Delete"They didn't know it."
DeleteThe old "anything is possible" claim that Somerby makes all the time.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You don't just shrug and say "anything is possible" and then go around believing whatever you choose. You need to look at the evidence -- and in this case the fact that nobody came up with any evidence that withstood examination. There has never been any support for the claim that there was something wrong with the 2020 election. Because so many highly motivated people could find no evidence whatsover, we DO know that the election was not stolen.
Refusing to accept the obvious puts you with the crazies, David.
@3:49PM - he's a charter member.
DeleteI was wondering what our resident self-designated "high-brow" Fox NOOZ viewer would say about the revelation that the on-air talent at Fox NOOZ thinks their audience are a bunch of dumb ass marks. I have not been disappointed.
Delete“It’s Easier to Fool People Than It Is to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled.”
It is less than quibble, DIC. It is a ridiculous attempt at exactly what? If I shout FIRE in a movie theatre thinking that the theatre is not on fire I am culpable. Oeriod. What nonsense from a regular Fox viewer.
DeleteThe 24 hour news cycle certainly produces bad results
ReplyDeleteno objective observer could really deny. The Daily Show
did run a mordantly hilarious clip sequence this week of Fox
broadcasters promising angry responses in their viewers.
Might they have easily promised greater stupidity in their
viewers? They are open about it now, and it may come
to that. They are hardly the only ones who have sinned in
this regard.
Bob now reveals in the two or three hour news
response cycle, so he now watches or reads the two
segments he wants to comment on, sits down for
that time period (I think I am being generous) and
GO!!!
Working this way he cannot even make the obvious
connection to what we have learned (more for the
appalled but not surprised file) about Fox here and
what Bob stupidly refers to as "Trump Trump Trump
Jail Trump!" Could Bob really be this dumb if he
wasn't typing a mile a minute?
In less awful times, it really wasn't he business of
one News vendor to report on another. Because of
Trump's unique (and grotesque) relation to Fox, it's
become a thing, a BIG thing. To paraphrase the too
cute pop ditty "Trump was a boy, Trump was Sean's
Boy, can I be anymore obvious?"
Who would expect Tucker Carlson to suddenly come
on and say "I have some very important things about
the revelations about how the commentators here at
Fox were misleading you about the Election results,
quite on purpose, with an eye on our Stock Price?"
And how odd what Bob is demanding is Wallace's
instant response to Tucker's broadcast.
Whatever, we now know Trump was trying to get
on Lou Dobbs during his rape of The Capital, and they
wouldn't let him on. Big surprise. What was he going
to do, urge calm and make the situation safer?
They no doubt knew they were wading into legal
problems already. Dobbs was finally canned. The
legal ramifications of letting Trump's sewer mouth
on Twitter and Facebook is never mentioned when
the issue of his "censorship" is raised.
How sad that only a huge corporation with
billions of dollars can protect themselves against
the lies of Trump, but we should all be happy they
can. That Bob has no interest in this, and no interest
in the cruelty with which Trump treated Ruby
Freeman is pathetic.
"Wallace's program rarely expends any energy wondering how our own blue tribe can bring the news of Carlson's disorder to the attention of persuadable red tribe voters."
ReplyDeleteIt is not the job of Wallace or her program to persuade red voters of things. It is her job to report news. If she started aiming her shows at persuading voters, she could legitimately be accused of propagandizing on behalf of a political agenda, the way Fox does.
How many red voters are going to believe blue tribe members when they say anything? That well has been poisoned. How many red tribe members even watch Wallace? I'll bet not many.
It is her job to attract viewers.
DeleteIf Wallace made Fox News the story ( which actually they often do, sometimes to a fault, O"Donnell too) Bob would be bitching about that soon enough.
DeleteActually, that BOB's job. One that he has been skirting now for a generation.
It is not her job to report the news! She is a propagandist. It's her job to create an easy to understand story, where one side is good and the other side is bad. She's playing to the rubes while reinforcing pro DNC, pro corporate propaganda. She's a spokesperson. She's as trustworthy as a $13 bill.
DeleteShorter Nicole Wallace: "don't think about the warmongering and death that, as Democrats, you are responsible for and you fund with your tax dollars. Feel good and feel superior to your other fellow countrymen who, as Republicans, are responsible for and fund our warmongering with their tax dollars and support of corrupt politicians. America. There's nothing we love more than war. We are war country, perpetually at war and we will continue to have wars forever and ever and ever and ever."
Delete7:39 you peacnick Trumpers really are a joke. Yes, let's give them back western Europe so they can keep it White and build a bunch of Trump towers.
Delete7:39,
DeleteAgree that she, like the rest of humanity, should be calling for the Right-wing to sit-down with trans kids and try to hammer out a peace settlement.
"Yes, let's give them back western Europe" Ie. War is peace.
Delete"Also, that metastasized pundit caste is increasingly partisan/tribal."
ReplyDeleteThis is an unsupported statement for which Somerby provides no evidence.
"Tons of money are being made as that metastasized pundit caste pushes tribally segregated accounts of a fast-moving string of controversies.."
There is certainly tribal segregation on the right, where Fox provides disinformation tailored to conservatives. However, there is no evidence that the rest of the media is similarly segregated or partisan. Only the right wing considers everything except Fox to be leftist. On the left, there are some extreme sources but none are as partisan as the right's Infowars, Gateway Pundit, Steve Bannon, and most are centrist or mixed in their presentations. Even sources like Mother Jones and Daily Kos are not as extreme as the right's comparable publications.
Somerby also exaggerates the money being paid to journalists. There are a few like Maddow and Carlson who make $20+ million, a handful more on cable who make $8-10 million (Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon) and then all the rest who make around $140-200K per year, which is what an experienced computer programmer makes. Pointing at the few highly paid celebrities and generalizing that to the vast number of journalists reporting the news creates a very false picture of the amount of money influencing journalism.
Bob, like too much of the population, still doesn't understand the rich are nothing but the poor with more money.
Delete"Somewhat similarly, it may not occur to our own tribe's viewers that we seldom hear "a discouraging word" on our own tribe's cable news programs."
ReplyDeleteWe hear discouraging words all the time. This is Somerby's conceit from yesterday, for which he provided no evidence at all. And why would someone who is supposedly liberal want us to be hearing more discouraging words? As poll workers know, discouraging voters leads to reduced turnout and that's how the left loses elections.
What are some of the discouraging words we've heard lately? One was the constant drumbeat of complaint about gas prices (even when they were quickly falling). Another was the numerous stories claiming that Biden was causing a recession and increasing inflation (look at egg prices). That turned out to be mistaken too. It seems to me that this sort of discouraging reporting in mainstream media is disinformation, misleading left-wing voters in the same way that Trump misled his own followers. Biden just had a medical exam after which he was certified as fit to do the job of president. Yet Fox calls Biden senile and Somerby says nothing to correct that assessment. Biden is cognitively fit, not just physically fit. (I am younger than he is and do not ride a bicycle anywhere.) This kind of discouraging reporting is disinformation designed to sway voters. We don't need to see more of it in mainstream media -- we need to see more truthful reporting, not follow the ways of Fox down some rabbit-hole, as Somerby keeps calling for.
"Free the John McWhorter One! Why is it that we never see him, and who knows what others, on our favorite shows?"
ReplyDeleteSomerby wants to hear more of those conservatives in sheep's clothing. I think of them as stealth conservatives. Somerby is himself one. They are pretending to be centrists these days, but that isn't what they are. This idea of infiltrating the mainstream media with opinion writers who call themselves liberal but express conservative memes and further the right-wing agenda, is just another attack on democracy, akin to the Russian meddling on behalf of Trump. These stealth conservatives work hard to confuse prospective voters, muddle discourse, troll and present false information, while preternding to be something they are not. This is coming from the "win at any cost" folks (like those at Fox who lied to their audiences), who do not care about democracy or our country's well-being. Somerby is one of them, but it is difficult for him to maintain the pretense while touting his fellow travelers (Andrew Sullivan, Gail and Stephen, Brooks, McWhorter, the two new conservatives at the NY Times (Paul & French). This is just more deception from Somerby.
Seems to me WcWhorter has been appearing plenty of places.
DeleteHe has been on MSNBC too. Bob has his head up his keister.
DeleteMcWhorter is a good decent person.
Deleteanon 4:37, why can't we simply excommunicate these conservative sheep clothing wearers from the democratic party?? There must be a way. Those DINO''s (democrats in name only) devote their lives to confusing naive voters with all that false info, false being defined as challenging, in a rational manner, woke orthodoxy.
DeleteAC, he is not a conservative. He thinks Whitr Fragility is crap and so do I. The stupidity inherent in being able to agree with Joy Reid that we are only helping the the Ukraine because they are White people helps no one. Black people who can never disagree or diminish other black people put Thomas on the Supreme Court. Stop jerking your knee and do some thinking.
DeleteThe labels become meaningless when people adopt one label but actually hold different opinions. Somerby keeps calling himself liberal while promoting conservative talking points here. There is nothing "challenging" about Somerby's points here -- it is straight conservative line, including the name-calling.
DeleteLiberals certainly disagree with each other and with progressives, but there is a difference. They don't support Trump, Roy Moore, or Kyle Rittenhouse, attack women in a sexist manner (as when Somerby said Chanel Miller shouldn't have been drunk at that frat party if she didn't want to be raped), claim that racism is over or that there is no gender pay gap, support book banning as "parent's rights," oppose the impeachments of Trump, and dismiss all the Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 as horrible. These are the arguments you have with conservatives, not with other Democrats, liberals or progressives.
Your silly attempt to further Somerby's agenda by representing yourself as a Democrat, much as David in Cal tells us about his liberal wife and his former liberal beliefs, convinces no one.
There were bitter battles on the internet between supporters of Hillary vs Obama or Bernie. Those are real controversies. There are continuing battles between the progressives and the mainstream Democrats in Congress, over real issues. Somerby aligns himself with no faction on the left. He is a right winger pretending to be a Democrat (or perhaps he was a former Democrat, but that isn't what he is now). You don't get to claim to be liberal without holding ANY liberal views. And that goes for you too, AC/MA. And no, this isn't stifling dissent. It is clarifying who stands for what. No one is telling you don't express your views. I am saying that your views are not liberal, not Democratic, and mark you as what you are -- conservative and bigoted.
No one cares who believes white fragility is crap. Your words and actions define you.
anon 11:05 - you constantly distort what TDH says and what anyone who doesn't agree what you assert says. for example - no one says "racism is over," Just like a lot of wrong things, like crime, murder, robbery, lying etc., "raqcism" isn't over. Just because someone argues that the charge of "racism" is used promiscuously, and has been expanded from what it really is, doesn't is not the same as saying it is "over." I'm curious, what were the "bitter" battles between Clinton and Obama, the "real controversies"? and what views do I have that are "bigoted?" If you want to make a charge like that, please back it up? After all, I've been designated a "Dembot" by a leading authority on this blog.
DeleteMcWhorter does and so does Somerby. A while back Somerby asserted that today’s black youth couldn’t come up with examples of racism from their own lives, a conservative meme. He also said that an Asian attorney in NYC was exaggerating the increase in hate crimes against asians after the pandemic.
DeleteGoogle “PUMA” to read about Hillary vs Obama/Sanders.
anon 6:29, you're hopeless - but - does claiming that an Asian attorney in NYC exaggerated.the increase in hate crimes.against Asians after the pandemic serves as proof that McWhorter claims that racism is over? Your logic is bizarre. And you seem to be the one who believes Clinton was abused by Obama and Sanders and/or their supporters in some egregious way (correct me if I'm wrong) - those who really are on the left can't stand Clinton, they think she's the one who is tool of the big money oppressors.
DeleteWho’s distorting now?
DeleteMichelle Goldberg says this:
ReplyDelete"pays much closer attention to various Trump scandals than to climate change or the war in Ukraine"
which Somerby then expands to cable news ignoring those topics.
Paying closer attention to one thing instead of another shows that a priority is being given to one topic over another, not that the second topic is being entirely ignored.
There are analyses that show how much times is devoted to various topics by different cable news channels. These do not support Somerby's contention that (1) cable news talks about Trump Trump Trump Jail Trump all the time, or (2) that cable news doesn't talk about Ukraine or climate change. In fact, cable news talks about both Ukraine and climate change far more often than Fox does, and in a more truthful manner.
However, Media Matters reports that Fox News has pushed anti-black narratives during every day of Black History Month so far:
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-has-pushed-anti-black-narratives-every-single-day-black-history-month-so-far
Here is the analysis of climate change coverage for 2021 by Media Matters (who tracks this stuff):
"2021 was a stand-out year for climate coverage on corporate broadcast TV networks. In our annual analysis of climate coverage, Media Matters found that approximately 1,316 minutes — nearly 22 hours — were spent discussing climate change on morning, evening, and Sunday morning news shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox Broadcasting Co., more than a threefold increase from 2020. However, all those hours of climate coverage on corporate broadcast TV networks represented roughly 1% of overall news programming in 2021, a figure that is still far too small in the face of a worsening climate crisis.
The increase in coverage was largely driven by various Biden administration climate initiatives; another year of deadly climate-fueled extreme weather events across the globe; and the pivotal 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), which was held in Glasgow, Scotland, over a two-week period in November. This rise in the quantity of coverage — after years of advocacy by climate journalists, activists and researchers pushing for more and better climate coverage by TV news — was supported by new and renewed commitments from corporate broadcast networks to cover climate through collaborative initiatives like Covering Climate Now and dedicated reporting during key climate events.
However, some problematic trends continued to materialize in the quality of corporate broadcast news coverage of climate change, including, for at least the fifth year in a row, an overwhelming proportion of white men featured as guests in climate coverage, even though people of color are most impacted by the crisis. And while broadcast networks did a decent job of covering key moments and events in 2021 overall, their climate coverage throughout the year was uneven."
"Our own tribe's viewers will never see John McWhorter on their favorite programs."
ReplyDeleteThis confirms that Somerby is angling to hear more conservatives on mainstream cable news. But is that fair when conservatives have an entire network all to themselves (Fox News)?
Joe Bob, he’s not a conservative and he has been on MSNBC.
DeleteHe doesn’t call himself that, but those are the positions he argues.
DeleteThey aren’t conservative. They are not confused far left.
DeleteMcWhorter is a black man who does not want to admit to his conservative views in an environment where other black people will reject him. He also works in academia, where being conservative would set him apart from his colleagues. Being a member of a racial minority group is hard enough without also being politically divergent among his peers.
DeleteSo he calls himself a curmudgeon instead. But that doesn't change his affinity to right wing views and his affirmation of typically white perspectives and his rejection of black ones.
He is a black man who has read, studied, and thought enough to realize that reality does not conform to the bulling conceits of any one group, including his own. He realizes childish vanity ( I cannot be incorrect due to my race, you cannot be correct due to yours) belittles the struggles and authentic accomplishments
Deleteof his people, and he won’t go along
with those turning a buck from
such nonsense. Obvious things,
to sensible people.
McWhorter got his. Now he's pulling up the ladder so other blacks can't get theirs.
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