Tag: newspaper ombudsman

The New York Analysis of Policy & Government concludes its look at the latest challenges to journalistic ethics.

The collapse of objectivity in journalism has been noted by respected members and observers of the media who are not engaged in the worrisome trend.

In her significant book, The Silencing, journalist Kristen Powers discusses how the media has purged those who disagree with left-wing bias.

“The vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are left of center….and some prominent journalists have openly confessed it…Daniel Okrent…conceded in July 2004, when he was editor of the New York Times, that on social issues…’if you think the Times plays it down the middle…you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.’ Similarly, at the Washington Post in 2005, one of the paper’s editors, Marie Arana, wrote “The elephant in the room is our narrowness.  Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions…if you work here, you must be one of us. You must be libweral, progressive, a Democrat.”

The American Press Institute has discussed the “The lost meaning of ‘objectivity.”

“Journalists who select sources to express what is really their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in a form of deception. This damages the credibility of the craft by making it seem unprincipled, dishonest, and biased.”

Michael Goodwin, in a landmark speech at Hillsdale College reported in Imprimis, said that

“I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this… last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.
Through this examination, the testicular spermatogenesis can be detailed understanding, which discount cialis has a very important significance for the diagnosis of testicular disease. It is the first considerable oral medicine for ED viagra for includes: Sildenafil Citrate Tadalafil Vardenafil and Avanafil compositions. Potent herbs in this herbal 100mg viagra professional pill offers control over your ejaculate and helps to prolong the love act to enjoy intimate moments with your female. This happens generally due to most common sexual problem in men known as impotence (or online sales viagra erectile dysfunction).
“It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left…But I was still shocked at what happened…This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in modern times had seen anything like it…The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast…We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news…For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown…They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings…

“…the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. …What happened to fairness? What happened to standards?

…If I haven’t made it clear, let me do so now. The behavior of much of the media, but especially The New York Times, was a disgrace. I don’t believe it ever will recover the public trust it squandered…

“Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return.”

Goodwin believes that advances in technology may be the savior of free speech, despite censorship attempts by Facebook and Google.

Long the subject of criticism for left-wing bias, the 2016 campaign brought into clear focus the extraordinary extent of journalism’s’ lost standards.

On election day, Kelly Riddell, reporting for the Washington Times  noted: “There’s one thing I’m certain about going into Wednesday: The mainstream media is going to need to go through a serious readjustment period after this presidential election. The collusion between reporters and the Clinton campaign, revealed by WikiLeaks, have laid bare to the American public the left-leaning bias of the press. The American public thinks the media wants Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win by an almost 10-to-1 margin, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released late last month. It mirrors an Associated Press/GkF poll showing 56 percent of likely voters, including 87 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters, believe the media is against him. The mainstream media has let the American public down in serving their own interests.”

The New York Analysis of Policy & Government takes a two-part look at the latest reduction in journalistic ethics.

The descent of American journalism continues, as the last vestiges of objectivity from the most well-known news sources continue to be reduced. The traditional leaders in the field have chosen to become partisan advocates, rather than reporters.

The problem was highlighted in May, when the New York Times decided to eliminate the position of “public editor,” which was held at the time by Liz Spayd. The public editor was charged with keeping the Times honest.  The publication had suffered substantial damage to its reputation over the past decade as charges of both plagiarism and bias were levied and authenticated.

In doing so, the Times joins the nation’s other best-known newspaper, the Washington Post, in doing away with personnel charged with retaining journalistic standards. In 2013, the Washington Post (which, ironically has as its motto “Democracy dies in Darkness,”) announced that it would no longer have an ombudsman to insure the quality of its reporting, ending a 43-year old practice.

Will Oremus, who was not particularly complimentary towards Spayd, nevertheless wrote in Slate magazine,  that the Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent, had “challenged the paper to introspect more honestly…he took a thoughtful look at the Times’ reliance on anonymous sources—as urgent a topic today as it was then.”

A publication that is as conservative as Slate is leftist, the National Review,  blasted the Times’ move.

“Now the Times has joined the WaPo [Washington Post] in dumping its designated internal soul-searcher …Spayd, who said upon her appointment last summer that “I’m not here to make friends,” was apparently a little too good at not making them… Spayd… said that journalists shouldn’t ‘apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidate.”

One of Spayds’ moves that apparently infuriated her employers was discussing bias (in favor of Clinton, and against Trump) in the 2016 campaign.  Kyle Smith, writing for the National Review, reports that “After Spayd told Tucker Carlson that some tweets by professionally neutral Times news reporters that displayed open contempt for and hostility to Donald Trump were ‘outrageous’ and ‘over the line’ and should face ‘some kind of consequence,’ the blue-checkmark battalions rose up to denounce Spayd, calling her ‘the worst possible public editor for the Trump era’ and ‘a disgrace,’ adding that the Times had ‘embarrassed itself’ by hiring her.”
If testosterone level drops, the man can experience low libido, weight gain and hair loss, all best price for cialis contributing to ill health and ED. The colorful explanations make sure that your attention stays gripped by the subject get viagra sample matter and interactive learning makes the areas under discussion, very easy to grasp. Read more about this effective drug via www.cheapdiscount wholesale cialis .com Before the invention of cialis and other erectile dysfunction medications, and they can start working just 15 minutes after consumption. In the past, most of the ED patients have the same concern with genuine and generic lowest price for cialis medicine of ED.
The Times decision came at roughly the same time as another major embarrassment to journalism was revealed.

On June 27, Project Veritas  released a video of CNN Producer John Bonifield, captured via one of the organization’s hidden cameras,  stating  that there is no proof to CNN’s ongoing claim about a Trump-Russian collusion. The video shows Bonifield stating, concerning the story, “I mean, it’s mostly b******t right now…Like, we don’t have any giant proof …I haven’t seen any good enough evidence to show that the President committed a crime. I just feel like they don’t really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the President is probably right to say, like, look you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.”

Project Veritas describes Bonifield asserting that the instructions came from CNN CEO Jeff Zucker: “Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN (Jeff Zucker) said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that, let’s get back to Russia.”

CNN has retracted parts of its Russian story. In the aftermath, three of its key editorial personnel resigned. A CNN Money article stated: “Three CNN journalists, including the executive editor in charge of a new investigative unit, have resigned after the publication of a Russia-related article that was retracted. Thomas Frank, who wrote the story in question; Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the unit; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN. ‘In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignations of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a spokesman said…. An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published, people briefed on the results of the investigation said. The story, which reported that Congress was investigating a ‘Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials,’ cited a single anonymous source.”

CNN has sought to make those three the token sacrifice for its corporate-wide mishandling of the news. Retracting a single story has not remedied the overall problem of CNNs’ exceptionally biased leftist reporting, which prompted it to gain the nickname “Clinton News Network” during the 2016 campaign.

A Rasmussen poll released in January found that “Among those who tune in to cable news networks at least occasionally, 42% say Fox News is the channel they generally watch, compared to 35% who turn to CNN and 19% who prefer MSNBC. These findings, too, are little changed from last year. Among cable news network viewers who watch Fox News most often, 50% say they trust the political news they are getting. That compares to 43% of MSNBC viewers and just 33% who tune in mostly to CNN.”

The Report concludes tomorrow.