Category: Media Criticism

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Conservatives Could Be Trump’s Biggest Fight

As the mainstream media pillory Donald Trump, and in doing so reveal the hypocrisy lurking in their news standards, Trump’s supporters find themselves caught between the rock of the MSM and the hard place of the conservative intelligentsia. And it may be the latter that are doing the most damage.

Because academia and the legacy media are so hostile to them, intellectuals of the right have for years congregated in think tanks and publications. Places like the libertarian Cato Institute, the conservative National Review and the Wall Street Journal, and the neoconservative Commentary (and more recently the Weekly Standard) have incubated and nurtured some of the best pundits and policy analysts in the country.

Yet today, not one of them supports Donald Trump’s candidacy, and several (particularly the neocons) are in full-throated opposition. Taken together, these “Never Trumpers” fault the GOP nominee for his stands on immigration and international trade, for his personal style, and for his lack of familiarity with, much less fealty to, conservative policy positions.

In other words, they have their reasons. Yet for all of that, there’s a look and feel about their efforts that smacks of vanity. Sadder still, their collective posture reveals an embarrassing lack of discernment » Read More

Maines is president of The Media Institute. The opinions expressed are his alone and not those of The Media Institute, its board, advisory councils, or contributors.  The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on Aug. 31, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Defending the Indefensible: Bias at the New York Times

The New York Times’ media columnist, Jim Rutenberg, penned a recent piece suggesting that biased news coverage of Donald Trump, at the Times and among other mainstream media, is justified and rarely observed in the context of other partisan or ideological issues.

Rutenberg’s claim is that because Trump says things that are rude, politically incorrect, or debatable, and “conducting his campaign in ways we’ve not normally seen,” there is no need for news reporters to treat him to objective reporting.

As the gentleman puts it: “It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.”

So … by this standard, which has been honored more in the breach than the observance by the Times for years, Rutenberg justifies the open vilification of Trump’s statements in things written not just by opinion writers but by reporters as well.

It’s as fine a piece of hypocrisy clothed in “journalistic idealism” as you’ll ever see, » Read More

Maines is president of The Media Institute. The opinions expressed are his alone and not those of The Media Institute, its board, advisory councils, or contributors.  The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on Aug. 15, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Overblown Backlash Against Peter Thiel for Destroying Gawker

The news that pro wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker has been financed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has sparked many opinions, some of them erroneous, some duplicitous, and some deeply shameful.

Before providing examples of each, a little background.  In 2007, Valleywag, a now-defunct blog site then owned by Gawker Media, outed Thiel, against his express wishes, as a homosexual.  Though he is in fact gay, Thiel was angry about this, and angry too about what he saw, and sees, as Gawker’s bullying journalism in its coverage of Silicon Valley’s tech industry.

For some apparent combination of these reasons, Thiel subsequently offered to covertly pay for Hogan’s legal fees in connection with the wrestler’s invasion of privacy suit against Gawker.  The gravamen of Hogan’s suit is that Gawker published online a secretly taped video of Hogan having sex with the wife of a friend of his.  At trial the jury awarded Hogan $140 million.

So right off the bat a couple of things are clear: Neither Hogan’s lawsuit nor Thiel’s payment of his legal fees are First Amendment issues, despite allegations to that effect in stories published by such as the New York Times.  >> Read More

Maines is president of The Media Institute.  The opinions expressed are his alone and not those of The Media Institute, its board, advisory councils, or contributors.  The full version of this article appeared in The Daily Caller on June 9, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Civil War Within Conservative Media

Though it’s not been well analyzed by mainstream reporters, the so-called conservative media have been split down the middle by the Donald Trump phenomenon.  Outlets like the Drudge Report, Breitbart, and the Washington Times have been in loud and consistent support, while National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary (the last two the leading journals of neoconservatism) have been in full-throated opposition.

Conservative commentators with other media are also divided, with such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Ross Douthat on the anti-Trump side, while Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Goodwin are pro-Trump.

Other right-leaning journals, like The American Spectator and The Daily Caller, also appear to be in Trump’s corner.

Falling somewhere in the middle of all this have been opinion writers like the erudite Victor Davis Hanson and the always-astute Peggy Noonan, both of whom seem likely to part company with those conservatives and neoconservatives who are looking for ways to undermine Trump even if it means the election of likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

It will be interesting to see how some of the conservative “NeverTrump” commentators handle the blowback in the days and months ahead.  >> Read More

 The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on May 23, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Shrinking Impact of Mainstream Media

Can there be any further doubt that we have now come to a time when the rightward half of the country perceives much of the mainstream media (the broadcast networks, big city newspapers, etc.) to be carriers of Democratic and/or left-leaning news and opinion?

The media deny this, but their denials – indeed, the very idea that the way to address this matter is to deny or contest it – change nothing. The bottom line is that perhaps one half of the potential audience for these media outlets holds negative opinions about them.

This practice confounds most people’s understanding of the marketing of mass products. Were millions of people, for example, to complain to car makers that the standard radios provided don’t work well enough, the manufacturers would endeavor to fix it to the critics’ satisfaction – not, as the media have done, simply deny that anything’s wrong.

So that’s an important difference between car companies and the legacy media, but what explains it, and what does the future hold for such media?

Understand what’s meant by the first of these questions. It’s not what explains why the reporters and editors don’t care that they are perceived as biased.  >> Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson: Telling It Like It Is

It’s not every day that a speech given by a publishing executive is truly noteworthy, but remarks given earlier this month by Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp., are the exception to the rule.

Speaking on August 13 at Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy, Thomson delivered a powerful speech in which he decried, among other things, the business practices of “distribution” companies like Google, the commentariat’s disdain for markets, the theft of intellectual property, and the politically correct mindset of Silicon Valley.

Though now chief executive officer of one of the largest newspaper and publishing companies in the world, Thomson has spent most of his life as a journalist, having earlier in his career been an editor of the Financial Times, The Times newspaper in London, and the Wall Street Journal.  And it’s these experiences that inform his views about the media and more.

Speaking about markets, Thomson had this to say:

When some commentators speak of markets it is in the abstract, slightly pejorative sense – markets are actually an aggregation of collective effort and hope and action….  >> Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Decline of Legacy Media, Rise of the Conservatives?

For the legacy news media, the bad news just keeps on coming.  In recent days, for instance, the Pew Research Center released a piece titled “The Declining Value of U.S. Newspapers,” chronicling the extraordinary decline in the purchase and sale price of major U.S. dailies.

Some of the examples given are so extreme they look like misprints.  The New York Times Co., for instance, purchased The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette for a little over $2.2 billion, and sold them both in 2013 for $71 million – a valuation change of minus 96 percent!

Not far behind are newspapers like the The Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times and the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, all of which themselves sold in 2011 and 2012 for around 90 percent less than their earlier purchase prices.

Nor is the challenge to newspapers just an American phenomenon.  Recognizing the importance of the American media, and its similarity to their own challenges, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is holding its annual World News Congress in Washington June 1 to June 3, only the fifth time in the past 60 years that they have held this event in the United States.

A WAN backgrounder puts the matter succinctly: “The 2015 [Congress] comes at a time when independent news media are under enormous pressure, one that threatens their societal role as the provider of credible news and information to citizens so they can make informed decisions in democratic societies.”  >> Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

We Are Not Charlie. We Are Weak.

The worst aspect of the Charlie Hebdo affair is that human beings were murdered for practicing free speech.  A distant second is the way this affair, and the earlier hacking of the Sony Pictures studio, has exposed the pieties and inadequacies of so much of the media.

Speaking the other day at the Consumer Electronics Show, Kazuo Hirai, CEO of Sony Corp., is reported to have said that he was proud “of all of the employees of Sony Pictures for standing up against the extortionist efforts of those criminals that attacked” the company.

Really?  No acknowledgment that the studio belatedly moved to release the film only after being criticized by virtually everyone in the country up to and including the president?

And despite the happy profusion of “Je Suis Charlie” displays, what has been the response of American media companies to that monstrous act?  As reported in Politico on Jan. 7, CNN senior editorial director, Richard Griffiths, sent a message to CNN staff saying, among other things, that “Video or stills of street protests showing Parisians holding up copies of the offensive cartoons, if shot wide, are OK.  Avoid close-ups of the cartoons that make them clearly legible.”

And here, according to a piece in Rolling Stone, is the way the Associated Press described its decision regarding the Hebdo cartoons: “We’ve taken the view that we don’t want to publish hate speech or spectacles that offend, provoke or intimidate, or anything that desecrates religious symbols or angers people along religious or ethnic lines. …  We don’t feel that’s useful.”

Even the Hollywood bible, Variety magazine, adds to the general alarm:

A brutal attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo over cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed has jolted Hollywood, escalating concerns by artists and producers that major studios and networks may avoid greenlighting movies and TV shows with potentially inflammatory content….

Freedom of speech is under attack, but, given Sony’s initial decision to pull the release of The Interview and its subsequent about-face, it’s not clear how rousing a defense the entertainment business is willing to mount in the midst of financial pressures, political dangers, and the threat of violence.

Making matters incalculably worse is the fact that the most immediate threats to free speech in this country don’t come from abroad, but from here at home.  As described three years ago by Jonathan Turley in the Washington Post, we are witnessing the censoring of speech under one of four rationales: Speech is blasphemous; Speech is hateful; Speech is discriminatory; Speech is deceitful.

Shortly after the Sony affair broke open, Ross Douthat, the loneliest and bravest journalist at the New York Times, wrote one of the most powerful paragraphs about that, and related, matters:

Of course it had to escalate this way.  We live in a time of consistent gutlessness on the part of institutions notionally committed to free speech and intellectual diversity, a time of canceled commencement invitations and CEOs defenestrated for their political donations, a time of Twitter mobs, trigger warnings and cringing public apologies.  A time when journalists and publishers tiptoe around Islamic fundamentalism, when free speech is under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic, when a hypersensitive political correctness has the whip hand on many college campuses.

So why should anyone be remotely surprised when Kim Jong-un decided to get in on the “don’t offend me” act?

So what to do?  Enforcement of the First Amendment won’t suffice because it only proscribes governmental abridgement of free speech, and only, of course, in the United States.

Here are a couple suggestions.  The next time you read or hear something that you think is truly awful, moronic, hateful, or false, send a comment by email, text, or social media stating your objections but also saying that you respect the right of the offending party to speak his or her piece.

And when you hear of some group or individual threatening advertisers with boycotts for advertising on programs they don’t like, contact those same advertisers yourself and let them know that you have a different view.

In the end, free speech can be guaranteed, if at all, not by the press or government, but only by the people.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  This article was originally published here in the online edition of USA Today on Jan. 15, 2015.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Rolling Stone and Journalism by Meme

It’s getting hard to keep track of it all.  From the over-the-top coverage by CNN of the Ferguson, Mo., affair, to Rolling Stone’s imploding UVA rape story, to the likely demise of The New Republic, it’s the media themselves who have lately been the story.

And not a good one.  Recalling the recent CNN panel that raised their hands in “solidarity” with the Ferguson protesters, Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner awarded CNN four out of five “screams” for endorsing this discredited narrative.

Meanwhile, the Rolling Stone story, about which the magazine says it is in the process of “re-reporting,” has been denounced by just about everyone, including Lizzie Crocker at The Daily Beast, who wrote a piece under the headline “What the U-VA Rape Case Tells Us About a Victim Culture Gone Mad,” and Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, who wryly observed that the “journalistic priesthood holds to a different standard, one that elevates the higher truth of an overarching ‘narrative’ … above the mundane details of fact.”  >> Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Gruber Videos and the Future of Journalism

Very few people (outside of those who wish them ill) have commented on the lack of substantial, and politically even-handed, reporting by the mainstream media (MSM).

Most of the White House press corps has been reduced, during the Obama years, to a gaggle of superficial chroniclers of whatever spin the White House puts on policy issues and national affairs generally.  Nor is the conduct of the White House press corps the only evidence of the journalistic failings of the mainstream media.

The Jonathan Gruber videos, in which his nibs brags of his cleverness in deceiving the public and Congress about crucial aspects of the Affordable Care Act, provide another example.  Some of the Gruber videos date back to 2010, so why are they only now coming to light?

More importantly by far, why didn’t the press fully examine and expose what we now know to be the many adverse effects of the ACA before its passage?  It isn’t as though no one had seen them coming.  Indeed, many GOP legislators, and conservative think tank experts, warned of precisely such effects.  So why weren’t those warnings fully vetted by the press?  >> Read More