In my 20 years of writing right-leaning columns at mainstream publications, I’ve made two arguments over and over. First, I’ve tried to convince my fellow journalists that liberal media bias is real. And second, I’ve tried to convince conservatives that, though it’s real, it’s not the conspiracy they imagine.
Media
Did the media sleepwalked into Biden’s debate disaster
That said, it really wasn’t a conspiracy. For one thing, mainstream outlets did report on the president’s age, even if too gently. Why were we so gentle? Well, there’s a broad journalistic norm against picking on physical characteristics (which is why even certified Donald Trump-hating columnists have made remarkably few cracks about his comb-over).
Obviously, it was a mistake to treat age, which affects job performance, like hairstyling, which doesn’t. But that error was bipartisan — over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Trump’s senior moments without ever putting those thoughts on the page.
If Trump had slipped as visibly and publicly as President Biden, it’s possible we would have covered that more aggressively. But there was a paradox — the reporters watching him most closely were seeing tiny, incremental changes, without necessarily being struck, as were people who infrequently tuned in, with the cumulative magnitude of the decline. Also, Biden’s White House was simply more skilled at deflecting journalists who did notice: masters of killing stories with kindness and punishing reporters who wrote things they didn’t like.
I’m told that journalists who started asking about Biden’s age would suddenly be given access to normally unavailable senior staffers for denials, then deluged by allies insisting he was at the top of his game in private. It was genuinely hard to know how to balance those testimonials against reports of possibly isolated lapses.
“But the videos!” my conservative readers are sputtering, and fair enough — yet video clips can mislead unless you know the context. (Remember the Covington Catholic fiasco?) The White House made it hard to get that context; staff rarely leaked, and anyway, few people outside Biden’s inner circle saw him enough to form a complete picture of his condition. The inner circle, meanwhile, is dominated by people who have been with the president for years.
A few phenomenally dogged reporters persisted anyway. But they weren’t rewarded for it because there seemed to be no audience for coverage of Biden. Articles languished unread, and Biden books weren’t selling.
Not good enough, I can hear my conservative readers saying. Okay, the White House made it difficult to get the story — but if Trump were president, reporters would have been more skeptical of White House spin, more motivated to crack the wall of silence to meet audience demand. And all I can say to that is: Yeah, you’re right.
The media’s treatment of Biden wasn’t a conspiracy to protect a Democratic president, but it looks like one because that was its practical effect. None of our decisions were entirely driven by partisanship. But if we’re honest, many of them were unduly influenced by it.
Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream newsrooms, journalists tended, with a few noble exceptions, to give a Democratic administration trust it didn’t deserve. The president’s invisibility was a giant red flag; they treated it as a restful break from having to monitor Trump’s ravings 24/7. As Biden’s decline grew more visible, people kept respectfully airing the administration’s insultingly implausible claims: that there was a secretly brilliant president flitting around the back corridors of the White House like Batman, while the videos of that same president acting befuddled on world stages were “cheap fakes.”
And when journalists did cover the issue, many outlets that had been pitilessly clear about Trump’s defects apparently couldn’t bring themselves to be quite so blunt about a president they liked — in part because that would make their friends mad, as well as the White House. A lot of articles about Biden’s age ended up so couched in ethereally vague language about “questions” and “concerns,” so defensively swaddled in equivocal context that the necessary SOS didn’t get through.
As a result, viewers of Fox News understood the president’s condition better than our audiences, which ought to be a huge wake-up call for us. We don’t have the exact problem conservatives imagine, but we do have a problem. And the only way to fix it is to add more viewpoint diversity to our newsrooms.
We should do this not for the benefit of conservative journalists, or politicians, but for the benefit of our readers. When our newsrooms lopsidedly support one party, our readers miss much of the story — in this case, nearly all of it. We need conservatives inside the building, helping us overcome our natural biases, instead of outside, complaining about them. We owe our readers, and our country, nothing less.
Continue Reading
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Bayo Onanuga battles yet another media Punch Newspapers
Source link
|
|
|
|
|
Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
News2 minutes ago
Health workers go on trial in Turkey accused of private care scheme linked to 10 infant deaths
News3 minutes ago
6 monkeys are still on the loose from a South Carolina compound after dozens escaped
News7 minutes ago
A look at Rafael Nadal’s 22 Grand Slam titles as he prepares to retire after the Davis Cup
Investment5 years ago
dynaCERT Inc. Invites You to Join Us at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference | INN – Investing News Network
Sports5 years ago
AP source: Bears acquiring quarterback Nick Foles from Jaguars – Sportsnet.ca
Media1 year ago
12 Bizarre Things People Did Just To Make Social Media Content
-
News11 hours agoTrial to begin in human smuggling case after freezing deaths of Indian family at Canada-US border
-
News23 hours ago
Trudeau heads to G20 in Brazil as Canada crafts approach to emerging countries
-
News22 hours ago
Russia grinds deeper into Ukraine after 1,000 days of grueling war
-
News22 hours ago
Big voter turnout this year benefited Republicans, contradicting conventional political wisdom
-
News23 hours ago
Nova Scotia Liberal Leader Zach Churchill’s passion for politics started early
-
News22 hours ago
October inflation expected to show mild bump up despite longer-term downward trend
-
News22 hours ago
AP sources: Biden for the first time OKs Ukraine’s use of US-supplied long-range missiles in Russia
-
News11 hours ago
Wisconsin Supreme Court hearing case targeting swing state’s top elections administrator
