Many media outlets appear to have learned nothing from how Putin puppet
Donald "Not Exonerated" Trump used them to amplify his rancid messaging in 2016, or perhaps they don't give a damn:
Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump's
misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or
misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review.
That means the outlets amplified Trump's misinformation more than 400
times over the three-week period of the study -- a rate of 19 per day.
The data shows that news outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition:
When journalists apply their traditional method of crafting headlines,
tweets, and other social media posts to Trump, they end up passively
spreading misinformation by uncritically repeating his falsehoods.
The continuing passivity of many major media -- whose truth- telling is supposed to be one of democracy's guardians against a would- be autocrat like Trump -- in clearly disputing Trump's Niagara of lies signals that the run- up to the 2020 election will be marked by the same both siderism and false equivalencies that gave us our
"young, vibrant" presnut.
The worst offenders?
The Hill, with 3.25 million Twitter followers, which passes along Trump lies and misinformation without rebuttal or context
88 percent of the time; the main Twitter feed for
ABC News, with 14.3 million followers, failing to dispute Trump
74 percent of the time;
CBS News, with 6.71 million followers, failing to dispute
87 percent of the time; and
NBC News, with 6.52 million followers, failing to dispute
52 percent of the time.
MSNBC? Even the "librul" cable network's Twitter, with 2.41 million followers, failed to dispute
55 percent of the time. With friends like them...
Among the better media: the
Washington Post Twitter feed, which failed to dispute only 11 percent of the time.
Not mentioned in the article was the
New York Times, but we can offer some anecdotal evidence from the past week that would suggest placing them squarely in the offender camp:
Then we have perhaps
the most dogged flogger of the "Hillary's emails!" nothingburger
inserting a phony Trump "spying" narrative in a tweet about why the FBI was alarmed at the Trump campaign's ties with Russia:
These smug corporate media and their jaded "journalists" are the same ones
Masha Gessen warned about, those that choose to fall in line to preserve their access. The difference is that now we've seen the damage they've done, and they're being called out more forcefully and systemically. Whether that's enough or not remains to be seen. But as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, "
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it" -- and he didn't say it on Twitter.
UPDATE: Schmidt's tweet/ story pleased a certain "young, vibrant person." Mission accomplished: access protected.
