Margaret Sullivan on the hiring of former Trump enabler Mick Mulvaney by CBS News (our emphasis):
Mulvaney has been on the wrong side — the deeply, undemocratically wrong side — of America’s most important political issues in recent years.
The larger issue here, though, is the news media’s blind and relentless pandering to the outdated notion that both sides of the aisle are pretty much equal these days — that they’re similar, just with different governing philosophies.
That’s simply not the case.
“We have a two-party system and one of the two is anti-democratic,” as NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen put it. This basic asymmetry, he noted, “fries the circuits” of the mainstream media, which largely refuses to recognize it or do anything about it in their coverage.
To paraphrase one commenter's view, democracy doesn't die in darkness, it dies because of shit like this.
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Washington Post fact- checker Glenn Kessler on Russian disinformation on Hunter Biden that's being weaponized by Republican media shills and parroted by the pandering, Republican- wired media (our emphasis):
The Russian Defense Ministry knows how to stir up the interest of the right-leaning news media in the United States — just mention Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
Russia for years has been seeding the ground to claim that the United States set up biowarfare labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics — claims that have been revived as part of the invasion of Ukraine. As part of his media presentation, Igor Kirillov of the Russian armed forces alleged the labs were part of the U.S. plot to study the natural immunity of the population to identify the most dangerous pathogen for people in the region. [snip]
First of all, as we have previously documented, these are not bioweapons labs, but biological research facilities focused on better detecting, diagnosing and monitoring infectious-disease outbreaks. Second, random emails can be easily misinterpreted without additional reporting.
We’ve dug into the records and discussed the deals in question with people involved. The reporting from those news outlets is false. Hunter Biden has come under scrutiny for business deals in places such as Ukraine and China that took place while his father was vice president. But he was not “financing” these labs. In fact, he was not part of a decision to invest in a company at the center of the Russian allegations, he did not profit from it as he was kicked out of the investment firm over cocaine allegations, and the company made little money from its tiny bit of business in Ukraine.
Kessler goes into some detail, debunking the various allegations being fed by the Russian Defense Ministry into our media culture (most recently at the encouragement of the Malignant Loser and other cultists). Just the latest (and continuing) example of the asymmetry of the two parties and the brain- dead media's "relentless pandering" to the worst among us.
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