this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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It's that they're fact checking trivialities. You have one fact check where Trump says "The stock market was up 10,000% during my Presidency". Then there's another fact check where Kamala says "I remember seeing the sunset in Pittsburgh that day" when she was already gone by mid afternoon. These are rated as equal lies in the tally.
It's not so much that they are deliberately pro Trump. It's that their need for false "balance" and "objectivity" stops them from calling out any one side when the lies are so much more egregious.
There's a recent Behind the Bastards podcast that covers how the liberal media handled the rise of Adolf Hitler, including the New York Times. The reasons for their behavior haven't changed, they never did any post-war introspection on what went wrong, and they're making exactly the same mistakes with Trump. The only media that can look back on that time and be proud of how they reported it were explicitly communist newspapers that never tried to hide their bias.
Trump can complain about the "liberal media" as much as he wants. He needs them to behave in exactly the way they do or he wouldn't get anywhere.
That’s exactly why he’s complaining. He knows they’ll pull this shit so they can claim to be fair. He may be an idiot, but he’s an expert at manipulating the press.
Listening to that Behind the Bastards episode right now: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Xt4xGrdzNvjIZe75bRdkq?si=72c4d10962674f57
Where do you see they fact checked Kamala harris about a sunset in Pittsburgh? I searched and couldn't find it.
Also, it's not like any fact checkers are obligated to report 1 lie for harris for each lie for Trump. They focus more on Trump because trump tells more lies. I couldn't find this data for NYT, but the Washington Post logged 511 misleading claims for Trump in the first 100 days of his presidency and 78 for Biden over the same time period.
Those numbers seem fair to me. You suggest that liberal news outlets are more likely to call out Democrats than Republicans for equally small falsehoods, but the numbers don't seem to back that up and it doesn't make any sense to me. Unless you can provide any evidence I don't believe it.
The job of independent media is to be honest and truthful. It is not to do whatever is necessary to prevent a given candidate from being elected, with the ends justifying the means.
It was a hypothetical. To my knowledge, Trump didn't claim a 10,000% rise in the stock market, either.
Tallies like this are exactly the problem. What was the substance of those lies?
Hunter S Thompson disagrees with you. From his obituary on Nixon, titled "He was a crook":
"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."
Look, you come to me with the claim that liberal news outlets are focusing too much on lies by Kamala Harris, with no evidence except a made up hypothetical, in addition to the made up hypothetical in the original post. I point out that in terms of numbers they are reporting about 8x as many falsehoods for Trump as his opponents, which is apparently a problem in itself- I guess because it belies the fact that Trump lies even more than that? I'm not going to scroll through the thousands of examples but from what Ive seen all their fact checks of Biden and Harris are substantial- not meaningless mistakes or inaccuracies. Meanwhile, Trump made the embarassing mistake of confusing two black lawmakers on that helicopter ride and that was front page news on sites like NYT. I would say the burden of proof is squarely on your shoulders to prove that they are being unfair towards Democrats.
As far as the role of media goes, I think we will have to agree to disagree. I think that the loss of credibility and increased political polarization that happens when news organizations become activist outweighs the benefits but that is just my opinion.