the state of the FakeNewsMSM in 2020!
30 Oct: Baltimore Sun: Most mainstream media did much better than in the 2016 election. And then there was Murdoch, Fox News and the New York Post | COMMENTARY
By David Zurawik, the Sun’s media critic since 1989; Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland; In 2018, he received the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism from Penn State University.
And then there’s Rupert Murdoch and two of his news outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, going all in as partisan political entities, journalism be damned. No figure outside of President Donald Trump has done more to damage the reputation of the press and endanger democracy than Murdoch, particularly with Fox News and its reckless, politicized approach to journalism. For the life of me, I do not understand why Murdoch isn’t vilified, denounced and treated like a media pariah...
No story better illustrates both the striking difference between mainstream media coverage in 2016 versus 2020 and the gulf between responsible media and Murdoch’s two most partisan outlets than the story about Hunter Biden’s emails. This was supposed to be Trump’s great “October surprise” aimed at making former Vice President Biden look as corrupt as Trump claimed his 2016 opponent was, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some of the same key elements were there: hacked emails, a hard drive and alleged influence peddling.
At the heart of the story were emails said to be from a computer owned by Hunter Biden and allegedly showing that he was trading access to his father. The person who had possession of the hard drive and the emails, and was offering them to various publications, was former New York mayor and Trump lawyer and surrogate Rudy Giuliani.
All praise for those in the mainstream media who refused to publish this story without verification and did their own digging into the hard drive and emails. The New York Times, Washington Post, AP, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC also all reported on the story. But they approached it within a dense context of facts that included the dodgy provenance of the emails and hard drive, and the fact that previous investigations had cleared Joe Biden of any wrongdoing in connection with his son’s work in Ukraine...
Meanwhile, Trump bombarded people with the message through his Twitter account and during his virus-spreading rallies...
As a result of the skeptical and textured reporting by mainstream outlets, the story has gained such limited traction that even Fox News has backed away to some extent in recent days, though such hosts as Tucker Carlson and Dobbs are still desperately flogging it. On Tuesday, Carlson devoted the full hour of his show to an interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden who has been making the rounds of right-wing media with his allegations of Biden family corruption...
And as impotent as the mainstream media has seemed at times in covering Trump, their dedicated, old-school, nuts-and-bolts reporting on the highly questionable sources and claims of Biden family corruption have defanged the October attack, no matter how hard Trump and his most devoted media lap dogs try to sell it in these final days...
But from curtailing Trump’s airtime, to fact-checking him in real time as Lesley Stahl did in a “60 Minutes” interview last week, the good media news so far is that the press has learned from 2016 and is putting some of that learning to work to expose disinformation and bring real information to American voters.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/zurawik/bs-ed-zontv-biden-murdoch-media-20201030-dyxjcofstfb3hdrt6pvmlekosi-story.html
30 Oct: Washington Times: Brent Bozell calls on conservatives to share Bobulinski story amid media blackout
‘If the leftist media won’t tell the truth, we will’ says media watchdog
by Jennifer Harper
“We are witnessing what is arguably the biggest political scandal in American history. The bombshell allegations that have emerged concerning the Biden family and now corroborated by Tony Bobulinski, outline potential federal crimes involving a man who seeks to be President of the United States. The American media are deliberately covering it up to protect Joe Biden’s campaign,” said Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, in a statement on Friday.
“This is the most important issue of the 2020 presidential election and the leftist so-called news media do not want America to know it. There is onlyone way for America to learn the truth,” Mr. Bozell said.
“I am calling on every member of the conservative movement to mobilize
to make the American people aware of this story. If the leftist media won’t
tell the truth, we will. The American people deserve to know the truth
when they go to the voting booth,” he advised...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/30/brent-bozell-calls-on-conservatives-to-share-bobul/
30 Oct: American Spectator: The American media is failing you
Journalism has become partisan promotion
by Charles Lipson, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security
Except for Fox News, all the major TV networks and national newspapers adopted the Russia collusion narrative and drove it forward. They relied almost entirely on leaked stories from anonymous sources, deeply opposed to Trump, mostly at the FBI and CIA, plus some Democrats on Capitol Hill. The main drivers were James Comey and Andrew McCabe at the FBI, John Brennan and James Clapper at the intelligence agencies and Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. They not only got a Special Counsel appointed but got him free rein. Robert Mueller’s prolonged investigation, managed by his deputy, Andrew Weissmann, hamstrung the presidency and helped the Democrats win the House in 2018.
All this time, Schiff was a media darling, repeating his claim that he had proof positive that Trump actively worked with the Kremlin. In fact, Schiff was sitting on secret testimony, given by all Obama’s top officials in national security and law enforcement. Under oath, all of them said they had no evidence of Trump working with Russia. Schiff knew that, of course, but he repeatedly told the press the opposite...
Failure #2: The media failed to investigate spying on Trump...
We won’t know the full story until US Attorney John Durham issues indictments and perhaps publishes a report. But we already know the main elements and, once again, we know the mainstream media missed it completely. What is that story? It is that the Obama administration used the most powerful tools of intelligence and law enforcement to spy on an opposition political campaign and impede the transition of power...
Looming Failure #3: Refusing to investigate Biden family corruption...
There are now three separate sets of damning documents covering overlapping scandals. One is Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’, abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The second is a cache of some 27,000 emails to and from Bevan Cooney, one of Hunter Biden’s disgruntled ex-business partners. The third and most recent is another cache of documents plus an extensive, on-the-record TV interview with Tony Bobulinski, an international business executive and another of Hunter’s former partners...
Whether Tony Bobulinski’s story ultimately pans out or not, the allegations and supporting documents are big news, worthy of serious investigation and reporting. Or, rather, they should be. So should the Delaware laptop and the Cooney emails. In fact, there is almost complete media silence about all of them. The laptop story was reported only by the New York Post, which was then locked out of its Twitter account for daring to share a link to its own cover story. Except for Fox News, The Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and some conservative blogs, the laptop story has received almost no follow-up coverage.
What happened to the Bobulinski story is even more amazing. There is an almost-complete mainstream media blackout, except for Fox News, which aired the hour-long interview with Bobulinski. Sinclair News has begun to do some follow-up. Of course, conservative media are consumed with it. Meanwhile, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC and CNN refuse to even mention it. A search for ‘Bobulinski’ on the CNN website (on October 30 at 4:15 a.m.) shows ‘Your search for Bobulinski did not match any documents.’...
The latest victim of this blackout is Glenn Greenwald, a prominent reporter on intelligence issues who formerly worked for the Guardian before co-founding a prominent website, the Intercept. Greenwald drafted a major article on these and other Biden problems for the Intercept, but the editors refused to publish it unless he deleted all criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate. Rather than do that, Greenwald resigned (for reasons he explains here) and published the article on his newly-launched Substack (here)...
Since nobody bothers to ask hard questions, the Biden team hasn’t even been forced to deny the accusations. It certainly hasn’t volunteered any details. The Biden campaign has never said the Delaware computer and the documents on it are fake, for example. They haven’t said anything about the Cooney emails. And they have completely avoided comments on Bobulinski’s devastating accusations...
These are the same folks who eagerly reported the most salacious, unverified accusations against Donald Trump from Christopher Steele’s dossier, based only on FBI leaks and a PR campaign from Hillary Clinton’s operatives. They seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as Talleyrand once said of France’s Bourbon monarchy...
https://spectator.us/american-media-failing-russiagate-obamagate-hunter-biden/