Here is a montage of synched up news casters throughout the nation who all report to Sinclair, parroting the identical message.
If this isn’t chilling, I don’t know what is
A few weeks ago, The Atlantic caused some controversy with diversity hire* Kevin Williamson. (*Diversity hire = white male conservative.) A few years back, he tweeted out that women who have abortions should be hanged. But, no big deal, really, just an unfortunate tweet in a fit of pique. Even Kevin Drum from Motherjones defended the move.
Someone did their homework though and found a podcast with Williamson advocating the same thing. Hanging women who have abortions. (Williamson also thought the US should just shoot all the detainees in Guantanamo.) So the Atlantic fired him.
And lo and behold, just another example of “The Left” suppressing free speech and shutting people up because libtards can’t win arguments on the merits. And here we have David French from the National Review leaping to Williamson\s defense.
(Below the link a post from elsewhere that nails the response. Click on the link to read more comments in context, including those who support the NRO position.)
Oh, here we go.
Sure, he can troll a little bit, and — no — I don’t agree with everything he says. I’m a moderate, you see. If abortion is ever criminalized in this nation, I think only the abortionist (and not the mother) should face murder charges for poisoning, crushing, or dismembering a living child. So we might differ about the laws in hypothetical-future-America.- David French
French tosses this out there like it’s only mildly controversial that, in Williamson’s future America, he believes that every woman who has an abortion should hang. Not “be executed”. Hanged. This is a legal medical procedure which something like a quarter of American woman have undergone, and that opponents want banned for ideological and religious reasons.
David French is a fucking coward. Who are the brave socialists and leftists National Review offers op-ed space to? Where are the challenges to conservative dogma? Where are NRO’s brave thinkers that refuse to toe the right-wing intellectual line? On any given day, the biggest disagreement between David French and his editors is about whether Donald Trump is bad but accomplishes things that they like, or maybe okay and accomplishes things that they like.
David French fails to mention here that The Atlantic hired Reihan Salam, who is undoubtedly conservative, earlier this year with nary a peep. Why might that be? Maybe it’s because Reihan Salam doesn’t write intentionally inflammatory garbage about condemning hundreds of thousands of American women to death and - repeatedly - reaffirm it.
The only thing Jeffrey Goldberg did wrong here was to hire Kevin Williamson in the first place. National Review can eat shit forever, and I hope every single one of their bomb-throwers is rendered permanently unemployable outside of the garbage dump that is conservative media. With any luck, they’ll all be shilling for penis pills and catheters the rest of their lives.
(Disclaimer: I don’t know if this is posted in one of the libtard threads here I have muted. If so, feel free to shoot me.)
I don’t know if there was nary a peep about Salam. There was plenty of grumbling in the blogosphere about him having been hired. But there weren’t widespread calls for him to be fired.
That is great. Hopefully this will occur more often.
Well, so much for hope.
So the report that the fake news reporters refused to condemn the regular news as fake news was itself fake news?
Inception!
I was happy that Idaho was in the news for something positive, but then haha, Idaho kicks me in the balls again.
Built to Spill is kicking off their tour with the Afghan Whigs this week. Does that count?
My local 10pm news channel is a Sinclair station and I haven’t seen the promo. Of course that doesn’t mean they haven’t run it but it does mean it isn’t being run every 15 minutes.
Strangely, Kansas City is one of the rare decent sized markets that doesn’t have a Sinclair-owned station yet.
I’ve watched all our local news at one point or another, and they’re all pretty good. None of them have much slanted news. There’s one station that has a weekly section where a guy who goes on Rants, but the rants are pretty benign, nothing political.
The NYT, covering the important, relevant news.
“Clinton lied” isn’t huge news, but in the wake of Comey’s book I don’t see why the new stuff can’t come out in a little story like this. It’s not like it’s not surrounded wholesale by all the bullshit Trump is doing. If we can’t acknowledge the shit that our own candidates are doing as wrong then we can’t call it out when we see it on the other side.
If the NYT did any kind of self-reflection or post mortem analysis of their own election coverage you might have a point (although how many people, exactly, were indicted for email server management?). We are in this mess in no small part because the media didn’t do its job properly vetting trump.
This is isn’t quite right, and not quite right in an important way. A defender of the media could truthfully say that every important flaw and issue about Trump - his narcissism, recklessness, terrible management practices, corruption, sexual harassment, complete lack of political knowledge, etc. etc. - was reported before Election Day. Even his Russian connections appeared in the press before then. Josh Marshall, for example, was talking about Manafort, Page, Sater, the changes to the GOP platform plank on Ukraine, etc. etc. well before November.
What this misses is the extent of that coverage … and the extent to which the media hammered Clinton for things that, in retrospect, were nothing compared to what Trump had done. By spending a huge amount of time and space on Clinton’s “scandals,” the media in effect downplayed Trump’s much more numerous and severe flaws.
The NY Times was the poster child for this. An analysis of their election coverage by the Columbia Journalism Review showed they spent more time going after Clinton for her scandals than Trump, even though Trump had more, and worse scandals.
https://cdn.cjr.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Fig01.jpg
But there’s plenty of blame to go around - CNN airing just about every Trump rally in its entirety without doing the same favor for Clinton is another prime example.
The real problem isn’t that the media didn’t vet Trump. The problem is that the biggest media outlets knew exactly what Trump was, but decided to hammer Clinton and effectively downplay Trump anyway because they thought they’d make more cash with bothsiderism (or, in the case of the Times, because they had a decades-old vendetta against Clinton.)
Because Trump couldn’t possibly win. He was the joke candidate. Until he wasn’t.