The online magazine "Wired" wrote an article abou a report by The Committee To Protect Journalists regarding Obama’s promises of transparency and his war with the press which they called the worst since Nixon:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired. ... a-war/amp/

Full report here,

https://www.cpj.org/reports/2013/10/oba ... st-911.php

The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate,” Downie said.

When Obama first entered office the left regularly reminded everyone of how bad the former administration was. Now, it seems reminding everyone of Obama's behavior, in this case with the press, is something to be ignored. Or, as DWill described, is just "spin"

The Left protects the legacy of its icons with the most brazen dishonesty and brutish double standards imaginable.

DWill wrote:Ant, he is the President of the United States, not a flame-throwing candidate any longer, and in only a month he has already tried to undermine faith in at least two of our bedrock institutions: the free press and free and fair elections. His words matter a lot.

No one here is seeking to excuse his inability to control himself.

Obama did much more than throw flames at the press.
There has been lots of speculation and little concrete evidence offered to citizens that provides proof Trump and Russia fixed or influenced the election. There was evidence brought forth that the media (CNN) and Clinton attempted to steer the election in her favor when the two colluded with each other during the first debate.

So far your specific accusations are overblown and without sufficient evidence .

I definitely have serious concerns with the political climate. What I refuse to do is ride this crazed paranoia wave the left has created strictly to undermine the current administration.

The election is over. Clinton lost. Deal with it. Like I am.

ant wrote:Geo,
It does not matter if their bias slant appears in the Opinion columns. The slant exists, with no real offer of balance.

Actually, it matters very much. For five decades (probably longer) the Wall Street Journal has managed to be both ridiculously biased on their editorial page and scrupulously fair in their reporting. Many of the best exposés of business practices and individual corporation malfeasance were uncovered by the WSJ.

I tend to agree that most reporters and editors share a liberal outlook on the world. Of course, they also tend to be better educated, and in the supposed Trump re-alignment, that almost ensures they will seem liberal. I could wish they would do a better job of providing a range of perspectives rather than drilling down only on the issues they think matter. When I was a journalist it was a commonplace observation that most reporters fell asleep over writing a budget story, and their understanding of economics tends to be similarly bad.

But when the public takes the editorial page as an indication that the news pages can't be trusted, they make a critical error. It is as foolish as confusing published lies, which are fake news, with "perspectives I disagree with" which are legitimate even if uncomfortable. I never stopped reading the WSJ, even though I knew their opinion page to be mostly drivel.

The Tea Party Right is currently engaged in a smear campaign to tar the legitimate press with the brush of irresponsible distortion which we get regularly from talk radio, the alt-right and even, at times, Fox News. The legitimate press handles the truth responsibly (even if, like Mother Jones or even Rachel Maddow, they are highly biased about which aspects they give space to), and they will apologize for printing something untrue. The new, mostly right-wing, alternative press does not take integrity seriously and are completely untrustworthy. They do not care how credibility works, because they know they are appealing to an audience that cares more about having its prejudices reinforced than about truth.

Complain all you want about lack of objectivity, but don't introduce distortions like "it doesn't matter if it is on the editorial page or in the news."

ant wrote: No one here is seeking to excuse his inability to control himself.

Obama did much more than throw flames at the press.

Did Obama try to make his followers believe that the press was persecuting him? No, he didn't. When the ACA rollout disaster was all over the news, for example, Obama didn't attack the messengers for reporting it.

There has been lots of speculation and little concrete evidence offered to citizens that provides proof Trump and Russia fixed or influenced the election. There was evidence brought forth that the media (CNN) and Clinton attempted to steer the election in her favor when the two colluded with each other during the first debate.

Every news story I have read or listened to has stated that the flurry of contacts between the Trump people and Russians around the time of Flynn's call to Kislyak, is not evidence of further involvement by Trump's people. But news of the contacts themselves should not be kept under wraps just because we don't know yet if they have any real significance. Likewise with Trump and Russia fixing the election. The news outlets I use have never said Trump asked Russia for help. There was Trump's very foolish public plea to Russia to find Hillary's 30,000 deleted emails. That was treated with some seriousness because it should be, but the responsible media didn't say it was proof that Trump had collaborated with Putin.

The Donna Brazile CNN episode was bad, agreed. If there has been no collaboration between Russia and the Trump campaign to give Trump an edge, and if Trump had not dismissed the evidence the intelligence agencies have of Russian hacking, attacking the intelligence community instead, the Brazile thing could be said to be worse. But at least one of those conditions doesn't apply, so the Russian problem has become major. If it should be found that Trump and the Russians were in cahoots, then the CNN deal becomes very minor by comparison.

So far your specific accusations are overblown and without sufficient evidence .

Which specific accusations would those be?

I definitely have serious concerns with the political climate. What I refuse to do is ride this crazed paranoia wave the left has created strictly to undermine the current administration.

Take note of some serious dissent within Trump's own party, such as McCain's scathing speech in Munich. If you do hold Trump responsible for his lack of control, you would not be implying that he has played no part in his own troubles, and would not be saying the left has whipped up problems that aren't there. Trump has provided easy pickings for anyone.

The election is over. Clinton lost. Deal with it. Like I am.

Is that tongue in cheek? Aren't you the one dredging up Obama and Clinton?

ant wrote:Let's take a moment and recall the level of mistrust and outright animosity the Obama Administration had towards the media:

What all of the breathless articles are missing is that the Obama administration did more damage to press freedoms than any other administration in history. The press seems to have forgotten that under Obama, the FBI and Justice Department monitored reporters' phone records, labeled James Rosen of Fox News an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a criminal leak case, and prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leaks to the press – compared with only three previous criminal cases involving leaks to journalists in all of American history

A recent analysis in The Economist concluded that the numerical difference was due to the recent developments in electronic communication which make it more possible than it used to be to trace a trail of phone communications. I don't really know, but it makes sense to me.

ant wrote:Trump calls the media bad names and fake news..Therefore, Trump is a tyrant.
Obama taps reporter's phone calls, demonizes certain journalists by labeling them co-conspirators, and prosecutes whistleblowers.
Therefore, he's the 9th greatest president in history.

To me the crucial difference is that Obama exercised judgement about what enforcement is important. Whatever your opinion about Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, for example, you have to admit that they leaked information more damaging to American security than just embarassment of those in power.

Do you know of any Obama prosecutions of whistle-blowers for simply leaking information awkward to his political position? Or are they based on actual security concerns?

Trump's loose cannon approach has directly implied that there was nothing wrong with Flynn's discussion of sanctions (there was, although in my view the lie was much worse than the legal violation) or the series of contacts with Russian intelligence (we don't know, do we?) but only with the leaks about them. That is so self-serving as to single-handedly destroy credibility. And of course Congress is ignoring this claim.

The notion that Obama waged war on the press is laughable. And you want us to consider his security-related prosecutions to be equivalent to claiming CNN is "fake news", the tip of an iceberg of lies and efforts to discredit the press for exposing his lies? No, sorry, the big lie may take in some people, but I am not one of them.

ant wrote:"As I said before, this isn't your normal hypocrisy from the left. It's a total meltdown of principles and ethics.
It's a shameful moment in our history."

The only thing melting down is your sense of proportion. If you want claims of lack of objectivity to be taken seriously, you must start by showing some. You realize that some of the most pointed criticisms of Obama's prosecutions have come from the "biased" left, don't you?

Here's Harry's argument deconstructed:

The implications of Trump's rhetoric and the harm predicted but has not actually occurred are

>

the actions actually performed by the Obama administration, which really was not harm, but "laughable" when scrutinized (ie 250, 000 bombs dropped in 2016 alone, at war the for the entire 8 years in office, and the deportation of over roughly 2.5 millions "undocumented workers").



If a bomb explodes and there's no one to hear it, did it ever explode? Liberal answer: NO

If an undocumented worker is deported with no liberal media outrage or white men to announce the inhumanity of it, was anyone deported? Liberal answer: NO


Prediction is a substitute for evidence for our social justice saviors.

Media Bias

geo wrote:- http://www.booktalk.org/post160112.html#p160112 – I challenge anyone to find a news story in the New York Times that is factually incorrect. I mean, sure the paper's Op-Ed page might have a mostly liberal viewpoint, but the newspaper serves a largely metropolitan readership. In its news coverage, the NYT and the other newspapers I mentioned strive to be objective and stick to the facts. They succeed for the most part.

geo, your comment here ignores the reality of media bias, which is primarily in the selection of facts, not the statement of opinion.

For example, a newspaper may consider a transsexual’s opinions more important and newsworthy than the opinions of conservative religious people. It can report on both opinions in a purely objective and factual way, but the values of the journalists will mean that only some facts will be seen as fit to print, while others will just be ignored.

Such fact selection processes are at the centre of media bias, but fall outside the criteria of bias that is defined as only existing in statements of opinion.

Such fact selection processes are at the centre of media bias, but fall outside the criteria of bias that is defined as only existing in statements of opinion.

That was an excellent point.

An interesting scientific study on media bias was performed by scientists at Cornell and Stanford. A computer algorithm was able to detect media bias patterns from a pool a large pool of sources based on which quotes from politicians each media source selected to publish.

From the quotes alone, you might not be able to tell whether the news outlet is liberal or conservative. But a computer probably can. Scientists developed an algorithm that, after churning through more than 200,000 quotes from 275 news outlets, discovered bias in their quote choice. Creating a graph that grouped media outlets by their selected quotes reveals pockets that pretty accurately reflect the political leanings of the outlets. The research suggests that information about an outlet’s political stripes is embedded in quote choice, surrounding context aside.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/cultur ... media-bias

Here's the actual study:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/Str ... tterns.pdf

Noam Chomsky, in "Manufacturing Consent", went on at length about how the bias of the media has slowly shifted toward the conservative end of the spectrum over time since the 70's. There are details that impact how this information is to be digested, but he made a convincing case of it overall. One point he made that I found interesting was that today's "liberal" news sources would be considered conservative by 1970's standards. The entire spectrum has shifted. The book was written in 2002, so I'm not sure how it applies to today.

https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Co ... 0375714499

ant wrote:Trump calls the media bad names and fake news..Therefore, Trump is a tyrant.

Therefore, Trump is an idiot.

The news he hates may be biased, but that doesn't mean it's fake. As Robert pointed out, it's about the selection of facts rather than the statement of opinion.

ant wrote:If a bomb explodes and there's no one to hear it, did it ever explode? Liberal answer: NO

You chopped the head right off that strawman. But there's an army of them left. Go get 'em tiger.

Robert Tulip wrote: your comment here ignores the reality of media bias, which is primarily in the selection of facts, not the statement of opinion.
Such fact selection processes are at the centre of media bias, but fall outside the criteria of bias that is defined as only existing in statements of opinion.

Now think a little further, and ask yourself what talk radio selects for. Who do they cut off? Who do they argue with? Who do they insult? Which opinions are treated as fact? Which claims get passed on without scrutiny or even responsibility?

The elite press lives by a sensibility of "noblesse oblige" in which those with the intelligence and sense of civic responsibility to reach the top of their profession make an effort to practice integrity and draw attention to the things they think need fixing. The marvelous book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, "Bully Pulpit", tells of the launching of muckraking journalism by McClure's Magazine (along with the friendship turned rivalry between TR and Taft). You get a sense from it of how secrecy serves the interest of nefarious actors, while sunshine serves as a disinfectant, and facts by themselves weigh heavily in the political scales.

If conservatives want to proudly own the heritage of John D. Rockefeller, Teapot Dome, McCarthyism and Richard Nixon, then attacks on the press make sense. If they are just bugged about which facts are given prominence, well, that is what the Heritage Foundation and National Review are for. What has been really sad to watch is the complete evisceration of intellectual honesty among conservatives in the last 20 years, largely at the hands of Tea Party know-nothings and mega-rich manipulators. Climate change has been the hallmark issue of that repudiation of intellectual self-respect, and predictably it is forcing those with integrity to, one by one, abandon the conservative movement.

It used to be that a nincompoop like Ronald Reagan would waffle on about how evolution might be wrong and figure he had paid his lip service to religion. If he claimed that his heart told him that he hadn't lied about Iran-Contra, well, then a big-hearted nation would forgive his lie. We no longer play around with such naive self-delusion. It's all a gunfight, the base that calls the shots on the right is the ownership class, and the only thing a pretense of integrity is good for is to get the other side to bring just a knife to it.