Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.
Have you seen how the media treated the MAGA kid? They painted a false narrative and all of Hollywood
and Twitter joined in unison to dox and character assassinate a high school kid who literally just stood there as he was getting harassed, called all sorts of names and having a drum shoved in his face.
But God forbid the kid smirk to ease the tension. What do we do to hold media accountable for painting false narratives and stoking the fires of tension, intentionally for hits and ratings?
I don't know of any good article on the subject, but I think the red/blue war in America is where you can see some of the most extreme examples of this. A simple illustrative example that comes to mind: A politician on the other side of the aisle makes a gaffe, a journalist amplifies the video/text of their statement, based on their followers' reaction a journalist decides if it's something their followers care about and either writes a piece about it with supporting information about just how wrong they are and takes on it from their followers/colleagues or just ignores it and moves on trying to find more red meat for the political partisans that read them.
Could it possibly be aggravated by the media telling us things that are obviously and immediately contradicted from what we see of raw, first person video accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube?
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial was a great example of this. The media painted him as a white supremacist and all that, and one of Biden’s campaign ads implied he was those sort of things. I was buying into the mainstream news narrative at first, but then I watched most of the actual trial. In the evidence and testimony presented I didn’t see even a hint of racial bias, and my conclusion is he probably shouldn’t have even been charged since the video footage clearly shows what he did was lawful. I will never trust most news sources again.
You’ve pointed out one instance of this occurring in the past. This doesn’t dispel the essence of the point you are responding to. You need to show that it was widespread and occurred in most media outlets.
The problem with your example is that
1] actually happened.
2] is a media/political fabrication being proven in a court of law at this very moment.
And to the point of this article, and many comments here, the news is much more homogenized than people think, because I'm quite sure you've heard no factual coverage of the latter from ANY pundit who sits in front of a TV camera.
It's not common, but it does sometimes. My initial opinion was formed on what the media said. Then a couple years later that I read it for myself and saw that it did not align with the narrative.
yeah the media absolutely is. this is the copycat effect (maybe there is a better name for it?) but essentially this you can see in media all the time whenever there is a big story.
Do you have any actual, hard, direct evidence to support the claim that there is some deliberate, large-scale campaign by the media to propagate such (alleged) false narratives? If there were, it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets; there would be no way to keep that a secret.
It's quite possible that people have good-faith reasons for disagreeing with you and writing stories expressing perspectives that you dislike.
Media have also been doing similar for a long time in search of sensationalist stories that drum up outrage.
For example, the story a few days ago about the white couple in Lake Orion who pointed guns at a black family. The couple were vilified in the press and implications of racism were made.
The couple has been charged and in my opinion (and presumably of the law) they were too quick to pull their (legally carried) guns out, and they will have to answer for this and the man was fired from his job. However watching the full video tells a very different story then
the headlines implied.
And there have been attacks on media sites, blogs, etc that admit their previous coverage was wrong and their attitudes towards the kids unwarranted.
So sometimes its the public bringing the media to heel, sometimes its the other way around, and sometimes it both groups acting like idiots and not doing any research whatsoever.
But yeah, there is definitely an undertone of disdain towards the internet, freedom of expression, outsider journalists and news sources, etc from the established corporate ones. And a lot of the 'initiatives' I've seen for monetising news sources, tackling bots and 'fake news', etc definitely seem very anti consumer/anti rights.
Those are all related, in that in all of them, the media gave a lot of people a false impression about something, which is exactly what this article is about.
That's true. But in every case, someone else in the media points that out very quickly, and usually within hours the problem self-corrects.
A great example is the Oval Office MLK bust. A reporter tweeted that it seemed to be missing and it quickly went viral, but within an hour, virtually every reporter and network had realized their error and retracted it.
95% of the people who heard about it heard it not from the hour of media discussion but from the days of administration complaining about that hour afterward. If the administration really was against the spread of false information, that would seem rather counterproductive -- but it seems more like the administration is going out of its way to paint a narrative that the media lies, despite this robust self-correction in every instance.
This is called creating a narrative by cherry picking facts. This is what the media does, and is why so many people (most Americans per Pew) distrust them.
Maybe a bit overstated, but yes. When media outlets orient their offerings toward particular groups, it is in every outlet’s interest to publish ingroup vs. outgroup pieces and exaggerate the conflict. This collective action problem is ignored by the media outlets because it is how they make money.
MSNBC has a history of misinformation contributing to the highly polarized environment today.
Here is a video showing how MSNBC purposefully cropped footage of an armed protester at an Obama townhall to hide his race (he was black), and used the clip to immediately launch into a discussion claiming that town hall protesters were motivated by racism. Soon after that media cycle my peers in college started assuming that most criticism of Obama is motivated by racism. These kinds of attitudes directly contributed to the current culture war of bad faith ostracism and tribalism.
Remember, a left wing activist also took violent action and shot up Congressmen at a baseball field. The argument of a "sufficient level" of misinformation and/or butterfly-effect-violence can be used to justify arbitrary intimidation and censorship against any outlet.
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