Community Magazine August 2017

AV - ELUL 5777 AUGUST 2017 47 In an April, 2017 speech called “The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards,” Goodwin declared, “American journalism is collapsing before our eyes.”Heevenwent so far as to say that themedia was “engaged in a naked display of partisanship designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.” Corroborating this notion, WikiLeaks revealed that in 2015 the New York Times gave the Clinton campaign the opportunity to vet any quotes, in search of a sympathetic story about the candidate. And earlier this spring, Donna Brazile of CNN admitted that she leaked presidential debate questions to Hillary Clinton. Goodwin blames The New York Times and The Washington Post for pouring lighter fluid on the coals. “They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I’ll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them." The result is that today fewer people believe the media. According to a Gallup Poll taken in the year 2000, a little more than half of Americans said they trusted the news media. By 2015, that statistic went down to forty percent, with only a third of 18-39 year olds saying they trusted the media. To what do we owe this loss of faith? According to Judith Miller, contributing editor of City Journal , it’s become “a deeper problem (of) failing journalistic standards.” Simply put, the media is “in search of more eyeballs.” These aren’t merely the opinions of two journalists or pollsters. Harvard’s Kennedy School conducted their own bombshell of a study called “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days.” Their report analyzed The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post , CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, and three European news outlets. The results were less than promising and the researchers came back with this statement: The media has set “a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.” Another university study, undertaken by UCLA’s political scientist Meg Sullivan, noted that “almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.” Examples are legion. On live television, MSNBC’s Erin Burnett (who is now with CNN) referred to then-President George W. Bush as “the monkey,” while covering a summit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In 2008, MSNBC’s Luke Russert said while covering the presidential election that the students at University of Virginia had the “smartest kids in the state.” They would thus naturally be “leaning a little bit towards Obama.” The implication, it goes without saying, was that only “dumb” people voted Republican. POLITICAL BIAS IN THE MEDIA In the past six months alone, far too many instances of egregious political bias have appeared in the media. Here are just a few of them: On May 26, 2017, the Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC News all alleged that Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed with Jared Kushner the possibility of setting up secret and secure communication between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin. Though they were unsubstantiated rumors, the accusation reads like another piece of evidence meant to sink Trump. There is very little qualifying language and these media outlets later admitted that it might be untrue. In a series of tweets, Peter Alexander of NBC suggested in February that the Trump Administration is easing Obama’s sanctions to make it easier for companies to do business with the former KGB (now known as FSB.) The tweet went viral and was used as another purported example of Russian favoritism by the Trump Administration. It should be noted that The Chicago Tribune took the people who ran with this story to task. In addition, Alexander himself tweeted a clarification, but the damage had already been done. Also in February, The Associated Press, Time Magazine, and Yahoo published a story on a phone conversation between Donald Trump and Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto. The content strongly implied that Trump threatened the neighboring leader saying, if he doesn’t “take care of his bad hombres, America will.” It seemed possible from Trump’s tone that the United States would not hesitate to send troops into Mexico. Time Magazine and Yahoo published the story, and from there it spread like wildfire, being retweeted by some of the biggest names on Twitter. Mexican authorities stated that no such implication was given in the phone call. In January 2017, Amy Lange of Fox News covered the fallout from Trump’s travel ban. One man claimed he flew to Iraq to bring his dying mother to the US for medical treatment. He insisted she was denied entry, as per Trump’s executive order and subsequently died. The man seemed to imply that Trump’s travel ban literally killed his mother. After some prodding, he finally admitted that the story was untrue; his mother had already died by the time the ban went into effect. Fox News did post an update to the story and corrected the misinformation. Also in January, in an alarmingly misleading piece, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin suggested that there has been a mass exodus of the State Department under the Trump administration. He portrayed the resignations as seriously unprecedented, an indicator of the profound lack of trust between the State Department and the new President. He even went so far as to suggest that these withdrawals were committed as a protest to his being elected. The story went viral. It later emerged that the people leaving were not really senior management. Moreover, a spokesman for the State Department issued a statement explaining that this kind of turnover is common every time an administration changes.