There’s media bias, and then there’s a press actively pushing government propaganda because the president told them to.
Today we saw perhaps the most egregious recent example of the latter. Follow along ⤵️
@FreeBeacon freebeacon.com/media/biden-im…
Yesterday the White House sent out a memo to heads of major media organizations telling them to more aggressively defend the president as he faces impeachment.
Rather than be insulted that the president would presume to use the American press as his mouthpiece, the media largely obliged.
Just look at this from @CNN.
And it wasn’t just CNN of course.
Here’s @NBCNews doing the same thing.
The “thought bubble” from @axios is basically a summation of the Biden admin’s talking points from the memo.
And @politico wasn’t much better.
This comes as outlets are already parroting Biden’s talking points about the impeachment more broadly.
The media keep repeating that there’s “no evidence” connecting Hunter and Joe Biden, as @ap does here.
@TIME did the same thing.
All these claims were made despite the evidence already presented. @mirandadevine summarized it eloquently in her piece about the memo today: nypost.com/2023/09/13/med…
After the memo was sent, @NewsHour had the guy who sent it on! The guy who had just told the media how to do their jobs. Unbelievable.
A few journalists did push back. Credit to @Ingrid_Jacques and @KimberlyEAtkins for doing so in the (conceptual) pages of mainstream outlets.
One tidbit I can’t get over — @CNN has seemingly changed its tune on whether an impeachment amounts to an “attempt to effectively reverse a democratic election” … something tells me they wouldn’t have said that about the last one.
I cover the press, so I’m not gonna wax poetic about how they’re immune to political pressure. But this has to be the worst capitulation to a politician for nakedly political reasons that I’ve ever seen.
And they have no shame about doing it.
The White House told the press to jump, and their response was “how high?” Just a shameful showing from the people who are supposed to hold the government to account.
A couple more because this is really egregious behavior.
The White House pressures outlets including @CNN to be even more skeptical of impeachment. @AnnieGrayerCNN, @MarshallCohen and @ddale8 are out with a fact check mere hours later.
@CNN @AnnieGrayerCNN @MarshallCohen @ddale8 Another from @AP - “no significant evidence” is simply not true (see above) and also the point of an impeachment — to have the power to gather all the evidence.
@CNN @AnnieGrayerCNN @MarshallCohen @ddale8 @AP @NewsHour did the same thing.
These are campaign talking points. It isn’t journalism.
@CNN @AnnieGrayerCNN @MarshallCohen @ddale8 @AP @NewsHour And it even went international. @BBCNews
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Before the fires were put out in Maui the media had already blamed the disaster on their pet issue: climate change.
I want to walk through some of the coverage b/c the way it’s bad is emblematic of how the media (wrongly) covers climate. @FreeBeacon freebeacon.com/media/hawaii-w…
Maybe the clearest example comes from @nytimes.
In explaining how lush Hawaii had become the site of a disaster, they declared it was “as straightforward as it is sobering” - climate change.
It wasn’t. It was messy, and multicausal, and complicated. As disasters often are.
Similar theme here from @TheAtlantic. Perhaps it is a warning - about the role of human error and corporate failure and bad local policies.
But it isn’t a warning about how climate change is “accelerating” at all.
"There were rumblings of a revolt against the agreement by...Freedom Caucus members...While conservatives likely can’t kill the agreement on their own, they can make McCarthy’s life miserable depending on how far they take their displeasure" @politico 5/28 politico.com/news/2023/05/2…