Andrew Sullivan on the Media (Rittenhouse edition)
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The RWEC says things that Sullivan omitted:
Remember when we were told the burgeoning border crisis was just “seasonal variation?” That was a claim trotted out in the Washington Post which the President himself quickly repeated. It wasn’t true, but most of the media never really leaned into the border story. Last fiscal year was the highest number of encounters at the southern border ever recorded and you barely hear about it in the news. Unless some member of the border patrol can be accused of whipping migrants (which didn’t happen) it’s usually on the back burner.
There’s also the issue of Critical Race Theory in schools, which the entire national media has decided is a lie despite the fact that there’s plenty of evidence CRT has taken over many college campuses and has a foothold in private schools. It’s already a part of public school teacher training and is working its way into curriculums in California, in Loudoun County, Virginia and elsewhere.
There are other examples of this, significant ones, that Sullivan doesn’t mention. Remember last year when Andrew Cuomo was made the hero of the pandemic by an adoring media (especially CNN which had him do interviews with his own brother)? It turns out he wasn’t a hero and one dumb decision involving nursing homes probably led to hundreds of additional deaths, deaths that he then tried to cover up.
How about the handling of the Kavanaugh confirmation? A judge was publicly accused of gang-rape by a dodgy witness brought forward by Michael Avenatti, another CNN-created hero of the resistance who turned out to be a criminal who allegedly stole money from his own clients.
And we’re not even going back to the media’s abysmal coverage of the Michael Brown case or the Trayvon Martin case or the Tucson shooting, all of which had major national implications. We’re also skipping over dozens of media freakouts over things that are quickly shown not to be true. This happens so often that it’s impossible to remember them all even if you wrote about them at the time.
When you step back and look at it all, it’s no wonder the national media’s credibility is lower than pond scum, especially with people on the right. It’s very clear that these errors aren’t happening randomly because they almost always trend in the same partisan direction. That’s been consistently true for the 30 years I’ve been reading the news and I suspect it was true for the 30 years before that. Mistakes are one thing but at a certain point, people are right to conclude this is either intentional or, at best, a kind of cultural cognition run amok. Until something changes (and I don’t see it happening) the media will remain just another combatant in the culture wars, albeit one that still pretends they don’t take sides.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@jolly said in Andrew Sullivan on the Media (Rittenhouse edition):
That's damning...
What's interesting to me is that
Sarah Palin's GynecologistSullivan and Greenwald, hardly right-wing polemicists are calling out their owntribeside for this BS.Good for them.
It's sort of like Tulsi Gabbard. I will disagree with her on almost everything, policy-wise, but I appreciate her intellectual consistency. And, of course, @jon-nyc would hit that.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion.
