,
7 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
As with the Covington Catholic smear and so many other media fails, this hilarious faceplant was due to media's tendency to uncritically pass along anything given to them by left-leaning advocacy groups, even when the reporter's own common sense should have sounded a Red Alert.
This is really one of the biggest single problems in the realm of Fake News. The media just repeats what lefty groups hand them and tends to identify those groups as neutral arbiters of fact, or at most honestly and deeply concerned about serious problems.
In other words, the media tends to treat left-leaning groups as "non-political" even when they obviously are not, and since they're "non-political," lazy journalists repeat information provided by them without much in the way of fact-checking or deep thought.
Of course, that's all turned on its head when groups leaning toward the right hand press releases to the media. Those groups ARE portrayed as political and therefore untrustworthy. They are frequently ignored entirely, especially when competing with lefty groups for attention.
If the media bothers to report input from a right-leaning group at all, they are portrayed as political actors and fact-checked to the level of petty nitpicking. If all the facts check out, the media will add "context" to challenge whatever point the group is trying to make.
Right-leaning groups don't get to set Narratives or shape headlines. The media is never going to give hold-the-presses coverage to a report on guns from the NRA, no matter how well-researched, logically sound, and seemingly headline-worthy it might be.
Average news consumers have no idea how profoundly this treatment of left vs. right advocacy groups shapes coverage, especially because it's easier than ever for lefty groups to push content to media organizations ravenous for quick and easy stories. /end
