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Role of the Media

Did not realize that. Shocking!

I know but I'd rather be a Russian than a democRAT!

My God, Parler users are stupid. And yet the irony is that they think of themselves as the only real American patriots left - everyone but them hates America and wants to destroy it. "I'm leaving facebook and goin' to Parley where I can say anything I want without librul censorship and being deleted cause they say my posts ain't true! Now I can spread the truth about what's really going on and fight for our great country. And thank god for this Russian server that allows me to do it! America Hell Yeah!"
 
Good read but I think even Rather struggles with how to hold Democrats in control of government accountable while also acknowledging that Democrats are a bulwark against anti-democratic, fascist forces on the right. Overall the press needs to realize that government is more than just the President, Senate Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House. They need to do a better job of covering minority parties, the courts, and what’s going on in the states that impacts implementation.
 
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There was a time not too long ago (before the Brexit mess) that I really admired the British multiparty, parliamentary system and was beginning to think that it was superior to ours in many ways. That was a mistake. They're in not much better shape than we are when it comes to stopping this insanity, and having several left-leaning parties (Labor, Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party) merely divided the vote and allowed the Tories to win in a landslide.
 
Interesting idea. Political reporting re-branding as government reporting. Orienting not between Democrats and Republicans but between the government and the people.

https://presswatchers.org/2021/01/w...itors-need-to-tell-their-political-reporters/

Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And, because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.

Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today’s Democrats and today’s Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I’m against that.

Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.

While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent, and write up what you’ve learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?

And rather than obsess on bipartisanship, we should recognize that the solutions we need – and, indeed, the American common ground — sometimes lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.
 
Apologies if already referenced, and really could go on more than one thread...

Interesting podcast from “You’re Wrong About”: Losing Relatives to Fox News.


Discusses some generational differences, aging and psychological phenomena, media differences, etc.
 
Here's a positive media story on CNN's rising star Abby Phillip.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/02/08/where-does-abby-phillip-go-from-here/

Abby Phillip’s breakthrough moment came during those tense, hazy days after the election, when results were still rolling in, election nerds were toggling back and forth between Steve Kornacki and John King, and the networks hadn’t yet called it for Joe Biden. “Can I just say, for Black women, this has been really a proving moment for their political strength,” said Phillip, a CNN political correspondent who co-anchored the network’s unexpectedly stretched-out election coverage with Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, and Jake Tapper. “And carrying Joe Biden to the Democratic nomination through the primary—Black women did that.” Phillip ended the quietly impassioned monologue by noting the significance of Kamala Harris’s presence on the ticket. “And that is the sort of historical poetry that I think we will live with for a long time: In addition to the fact that Donald Trump’s political career began with the racist birther lie, it may very well end with a Black woman in the White House.”
Clips of Phillip’s one-minute talk, which came a night before her network declared Biden the victor, quickly echoed around Twitter, and the response was intense. When HuffPost senior editor Philip Lewis tweeted it out, he got almost 30,000 likes. (And, of course, there was plenty of the nasty pushback you’d expect from certain quarters.) “I mean, it was a profound moment,” says Tapper, who was next to Phillip at the time on CNN’s election set. “There was something special about the fact that there was a Black woman at the desk noting this moment. I wasn’t thinking about whether it was going to go viral. I was just thinking, ‘Wow, what a brilliant observation, and what a special moment to experience.’ ”
 
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