This is IMPORTANT.... please READ !!
Read and THINK deeply for a moment.
Would a Trump re-election effect your life?
Inprove it or degrade it?
What are your options?
In Love & Truth, Eric
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from: https://hartmannreport.com/p/will-this-eras-yellow-journalism
Will This Era's
"Yellow Journalism" Forecast Disaster for the Elections in
2024?
Unlike the 1890s, when there were
still papers engaging in serious journalism, today’s yellow
journalism is ubiquitous across media consumed by the majority
of Americans…
Thom Hartmann
Nov 30, 2023
Image by Ivan Drokonov from Pixabay
Over at his excellent Substack newsletter, former Labor
Secretary Robert Reich asks the question that’s probably on the
minds of many: “Why are so many people prepared to vote for
Trump?”
After all, there have been at least seven national polls
conducted by reputable organizations in the past few weeks and
not a single one shows Biden beating Trump in a 2024 matchup.
Reich cites the many crimes, lies, and outright fascistic
statements attributed to Trump, followed by the considerable
list of Biden’s accomplishments, and then offers a poll asking
if people say they’re voting for America’s first true wannabee
dictator because of ignorance, anger/fear, racism/xenophobia, or
Biden’s age.
All are no doubt significant factors, but I believe the largest
variable in Americans’ willingness to say they’ll vote for Trump
is far simpler: the consequence of yellow journalism.
I’m not talking about a simple left/right bias, a political
preference held by reporters or publishers and editors of the
nation’s major media outlets. While there’s a strong case to be
made for billion-dollar corporations and multimillionaire media
personalities having a preference for low taxes and
deregulation, for example, the bias I’m referencing has to do
with spectacle.
Generations ago, we referred to newspapers that emphasized
scandal and celebrity intrigue as “yellow journalism.” The
phrase dates back to the 1890s when William Randolph Hearst
bought, in 1895, the Journal, a New York newspaper that he used
to successfully compete with Joseph Pulitizer’s then-dominant
New York World.
Hearst hired away from Pulitzer’s papers a number of famous
writers along with Richard Outcault, then arguably the nation’s
most famous cartoonist, who penned the wildly popular series
called The Yellow Kid. Between Outcault’s draw and Hearst’s
emphasis on celebrity and sensationalism, from the 1890s until
the WWII era, “yellow journalism” dominated the American media
scene.
It quite literally took World War II to push public demand for
real news and serious reporting — and a new emphasis on
fact-based reporting and substance over flash — back into media
dominance. It birthed what became the era of Walter Cronkite and
Catherine Graham, with honest, credible reporting on everything
from Nixon’s Watergate crimes to the horrors of the Kennedy
assassination and the Vietnam War.
Cronkite competed with Huntley and Brinkley based on the quality
of their reporting and the credibility of their sources, as did
the nation’s major and even regional newspapers and radio news
networks.
I trace the modern era of yellow journalism to the 1990s, when
the nation was transfixed by Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr’s
relentless and pornographic pursuit of Bill Clinton’s affair
with Monica Lewinsky.
After Reagan ended enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987,
radio and TV stations were no longer burdened by the requirement
to “program in the public interest” to maintain their broadcast
licenses; all three major TV networks moved their news divisions
— which had universally been losing money because of the
requirement for “real news” — under the arm of their
entertainment divisions, where they remain to this day and have
now become significant profit centers.
Rush Limbaugh’s 1988 national syndication and Rupert Murdoch’s
1996 Fox “News” set the tone for this era’s new yellow
journalism, frontloading — as did Hearst back in the day —
personality, celebrity, and scandal over the boring details of
policy, debate, and the consequence of congressional and
presidential decisions.
The “yellow” of this era’s “yellow journalism,” I’d argue, more
accurately means “cowardly,” now that nobody remembers the
cartoon of the 1890s. And, unlike the 1890s when there were
still papers engaging in serious journalism, today’s yellow
journalism is ubiquitous across the media consumed by the
majority of Americans.
As a consequence, a September Wall Street Journal poll found
that 52% of voters today claim that Trump “has a strong record
of accomplishments” but only 40% say the same for Biden.
And now the researchers are beginning to weigh in, documenting
how 21st century yellow journalism has altered our political
landscape and led to the rise of the ultimate
scandal/celebrity/personality spectacle: Donald Trump and his
fascist cult followers.
The Columbia Journalism Review, arguably the premiere watchdog
of American news reporting, just published a scathing indictment
of political coverage in The New York Times and The Washington
Post.
Because these newspapers are so widely read and respected, they
tend to set the agenda and tone for most other reporting in the
United States, and what the Review found was shocking:
“Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace
intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than
to educate them on essential differences between political
parties. …
“By the numbers, of four hundred and eight articles on the
front page of the Times during the period we analyzed, about
half—two hundred nineteen—were about domestic politics. A
generous interpretation found that just ten of those stories
explained domestic public policy in any detail; only one
front-page article in the lead-up to the midterms really leaned
into discussion about a policy matter in Congress: Republican
efforts to shrink Social Security.
“Of three hundred and ninety-three front-page articles in
the Post, two hundred fifteen were about domestic politics; our
research found only four stories that discussed any form of
policy. The Post had no front-page stories in the months ahead
of the midterms on policies that candidates aimed to bring to
the fore or legislation they intended to pursue. Instead,
articles speculated about candidates and discussed where voter
bases were leaning.”
This is the exact same type of yellow journalism “reporting”
that led up to the 2016 election and brought us Donald Trump as
president, and is a clear echo of the days of Hearst’s New York
Journal.
But it’s not just selective reporting of the news of the day
with a heavy tilt toward the GOP (or, more correctly, a steady
refusal to report on the accomplishments of Biden and
Democrats).
Another factor that Hearst played on heavily and has come to
dominate what passes today for journalism is the inversion of
expectation.
As any comedian can tell you, an involuntary laugh response
comes when a person thinks they know what’s coming next and is
then, instead, surprised by the unexpected.
“I just flew in from New York,” Red Skelton used to famously
say, deadpan. “Boy, are my arms tired!”
In his 1941 book American Journalism. A History of Newspapers in
the United States through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940, Frank Luther
Mott famously noted the hallmark of Hearst’s time:
“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it
happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”
In today’s yellow journalism era, reporters are far more
interested in “man bites dog” stories than in examining the
factors and history that may have provoked that bite, or even
covering in any detail the frequency of dogs biting people.
The latest example comes from an in-depth analysis done by Media
Matters comparing Hillary Clinton’s private comment about
Trump’s followers being “a basket of deplorables” and Trump’s
very public proclamation, literally echoing Hitler, that some of
us are “vermin” who he intends to “root out” and eliminate from
American society.
Clinton is a reasonable and thoughtful politician and former
diplomat, so her “deplorables” comment was seen by our yellow
press as “man bites dog.”
Trump, on the other hand, is a sadistic fascist whose call for
the extermination of his political opponents could reasonably be
expected: “dog bites man.”
The data proves the thesis, as Media Matters notes:
“Media Matters reviewed the nationally syndicated broadcast
news shows — ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and
This Week; CBS’ This Morning, Mornings, Evening News, and Face
the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press —
in the first week after each remark.
“We found that those programs aired 54 minutes of coverage
of Clinton's ‘deplorables’ comment but just 3 minutes regarding
Trump's ‘vermin’ remark.
“ABC News aired 20 minutes of ‘deplorables’ coverage across
13 segments and 3 teasers, but devoted only a single minute of
coverage to the ‘vermin’ comment, during an interview with the
network’s chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, about
his new book.
“CBS News provided 13 minutes of ‘deplorables’ coverage
across 11 segments and 3 teasers, compared to 1 passing mention
of the ‘vermin’ remark on Face the Nation that comprised less
than 30 seconds.
“And NBC News spent 21 minutes of airtime on the
‘deplorables’ comment across 11 segments, compared to 2 minutes
on ‘vermin’ — one a passing mention, the other an interview in
which Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker read the comment
to Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and asked
her, ‘Are you comfortable with this language coming from the GOP
front-runner?’ (McDaniel declined to comment.)”
Cable news (CNN, Fox “News,” and MSNBC) wasn’t much different:
“On CNN, there were 553 mentions of ‘deplorable’ compared to
70 for ‘vermin.’
“On Fox News, there were 513 mentions of ‘deplorable’
compared to only 9 of ‘vermin.’
“And on MSNBC, there were 596 mentions of ‘deplorables’
compared to only 112 of ‘vermin.’
The reporters at Media Matters then turned their attention to
the nation’s five largest newspapers by circulation: “the Los
Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street
Journal, and The Washington Post — in the first week following
each remark.”
Here, they found the pattern repeated.
The LA Times published 3 articles about Clintons “deplorables”
comment, two on the front page. But not even one single article
during the week after Trump mentioned “vermin” made any
reference whatsoever about his remark.
The New York Times had seven articles about Clinton’s comment,
four on the front page; like the LA Times, there wasn’t a single
news story mentioning Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment during that time
period.
The Wall Street Journal similarly ignored Trump’s comment
altogether, but ran 8 articles about Clinton’s faux pas, four of
them on the front page.
The Washington Post at least mentioned Trump’s comment once, on
page A2 (including it in the headline), but gave Clinton’s
remark 9 stories, one on the front page, with five using the
word “deplorables” in the headline.
USA Today covered Clinton’s comment in 2 news articles but, like
three of the other four papers completely ignored Trump’s.
So far as I can tell there’s been no similar analysis of Obama’s
leaked comment about Pennsylvania voters in areas that had been
deindustrialized by Reagan’s neoliberal free trade policies and
the GOP’s destruction of the trade union movement.
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter,” Obama told a
closed-door group of donors, “they cling to guns or religion or
antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations.”
The coverage at the time almost completely ignored the context
of Obama’s remarks and, instead, focused on the “man bites dog”
of a Black politician criticizing rural white voters.”
This Tuesday, Trump demanded “the government” must “come down
hard” and “punish” MSNBC because Lawrence O’Donnell criticized
him on-air.
In any other democratic nation a leading politician calling for
the censorship or punishment of a media outlet would be front
page news. Here in America, it was only covered by Deadline, a
newspaper that covers Hollywood, and on Lawrence’s own show.
At the same time, while our economy in many ways is doing better
than it has since the 1960s, there’s virtually no mention of
that in the media, either. It doesn’t bleed, so it doesn’t lede.
As a result, The Wall Street Journal reported last week:
“Only 36% of voters in a new Wall Street Journal/NORC survey
said the American dream still holds true, substantially fewer
than the 53% who said so in 2012 and 48% in 2016 in similar
surveys of adults by another pollster.”
Not only has this era’s yellow journalism facilitated the rise
of a fascist demagogue and his cult; it has altogether warped
Americans’ view of objective reality.
To paraphrase Clinton’s 1992 campaign, the answer to Reich’s
plaintive question about why more voters are going for Trump
than Biden regardless of the realities in the fact-based world:
“It’s the media, stupid.” (With the highest respect for Reich.)
It’s almost a cliche these days to complain about the
“infotainment” we see in TV and radio “news” reporting that has
come about in the wake of Reagan ending enforcement of the
Fairness Doctrine, but to see this same type of horserace
coverage passing as news on the front pages of the nation’s
largest newspapers is, frankly, a crime against our democracy.
For voters to make intelligent decisions about candidates, they
must be well-informed. Sadly, that is very much not what is
happening today in America, and our era’s yellow journalism
bodes ill for the 2024 elections and the future of our
democratic republic.
What can be done about this?
In 1983, President Reagan directed the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to
essentially stop enforcing our nation’s antitrust laws. As a
result, our media has been massively consolidated and is more
driven by corporate boardrooms’ profit considerations than any
thought about the future of our nation.
For example, today more than half of all our country’s local
newspapers are owned by a handful of New York-based hedge funds.
Nonetheless, America’s media is not immune to pressure and
demands from the public. Most media organizations allow for
comments on their articles, letters to the editor, or simply
private, typically email, feedback from readers.
Both Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Toqueville famously
highlighted the critical importance to our democracy of a free
and independent press.
Now that our nation’s massive media corporations have failed so
tragically in their obligation to inform the public and hold
power to account, that job falls to us.
Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public
so feel free to share it.
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