NeedNotBeOursVille
From Laura Hazard Owen writing for the Nieman Lab:
It wasn’t all that long ago that news outlets were doing a lot of handwringing over whether to ever use the word “lie” in relation to politicians lying about things. “Each time President Trump says something that we know, based on the evidence, is not accurate, we hear from readers who are upset that we did not call the president a liar,” The New York Times wrote in 2018.
{snip}
...Many mainstream outlets have simply regurgitated false statements, tweeting them out with no context or turning them into headlines. (Hi CNN, AP, AP, Financial Times, New York Post, Reuters, and so on.)
Cleveland’s Plain Dealer decided to do something different. Back in March, the publication’s staffers grappled with questions over “our responsibility in how we cover the candidacy of Republican Josh Mandel for the U.S. Senate in 2022,” Chris Quinn, the VP of content at Advance Ohio and editor of Cleveland.com, wrote at the time:
"The issue is that Mandel has a history of not telling the truth when he campaigns — he was our PolitiFact Ohio “Pants on Fire” champion during his first run for Senate because of the whoppers he told. More recently, he is given to irresponsible and potentially dangerous statements on social media. He’s proven himself to be a candidate who will say just about anything if it means getting his name in the news. We have not dealt with a candidate like this on the state level previously. […]
We ultimately decided not to write about Mandel’s call for DeWine to lift his coronavirus restrictions. Mandel is pretty much a nobody right now, a nobody begging for people to notice his tweets a year ahead of the Senate primary. Just because he makes outrageous, dangerous statements doesn’t mean it is news.
He remains desperate for attention. Last week, he challenged our columnist Leila Atassi to a point-by-point debate — to be published on our platforms — about coronavirus restrictions. Leila was eager to give it a go, knowing that she could use facts and science to obliterate Mandel in that debate.
I told her to decline. We are proud of our role as a center of discourse, with a diversity of viewpoints you can find nowhere else in the state. But we do not knowingly publish ridiculous and idiotic claims. Mandel did not want to have a debate with our columnist as much as he wanted to use our platform to get attention with demonstrably false claims about the virus."
Steve Gilliard, the greatest progressive blogger of all time*, once wrote the following about those who would spout codswallop:
"I'm not interested in debating them....I want to stop them."
So now, fifteen years later, it appears that the Gilliard Doctrine has been reborn in a mainstream media organ.
Imagine that!
_______
1 comment:
too bad Ms. Owen's article isn't being published in papers all across the world. It would be a very good thing if the media simply stopped giving some of these liars air or space time.
If the media had not given "air time" to many of these COVID deniers and anti vaccers, a lot more people might have been vaccinated. Printing lies just plain lazy on the part of the media.
Post a Comment