We already dropped LATimes so I can't check that. But it's interesting to see who considers it newsworthy. Most of the Montana papers I checked led with "A swastika-tattooed suspect..."
We already dropped LATimes so I can't check that. But it's interesting to see who considers it newsworthy. Most of the Montana papers I checked led with "A swastika-tattooed suspect..."
Inside the Meltdown at CNN CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the networkâs reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?
One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than âsave journalism.â But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.
It comes as no surprise that corporate media likes a good, wholesome war as much as the average American. It sells. Morally ambiguous wars, or worse, peace, do not sell. People lose interest. This NYT article is illustrative of so many articles in corporate media about Ukraine and war.
The real story here, other than corporate media being a megaphone for the Pentagon, is of one man trying to redeem his past acts of violence by committing future acts of violence in yet another proxy war of superpowers. It is a story of a culture of militarism and toxic masculinity perpetuating the idea that if we can just find a good, morally unambiguous war all will be well with our society.
The New Kremlinology: Reading the New York Times With censorship soaring and real reporting all but taboo, the major dailies have just one important function left: being a political signaling system.
Historically, the amount of news coverage devoted to foreign wars has been positively correlated with the direct involvement of the U.S. military. âNormal expectations are that wars are always more newsworthy in America when American lives are at risk,â according to Tyndall, who noted that the only war in the last several decades to which the networks devoted as much time in one month as last monthâs total coverage of Ukraine was in Kosovo in April 1999 (565 minutes) when U.S. aircraft led NATOâs bombing campaign against Serbia.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in late February, âhas overturned all normal patterns of journalistic response,â according to Tyndall. He gave most of the credit to the leadership and media savvy of President Volodymyr Zelensky who has largely controlled the narrative conveyed to Americans via the networks.
âIt is a demonstration of Zelenskyâs perceived newsworthiness that both ABC World News tonight and NBC Nightly News decided to assign their anchors to an extended interview with him, despite the fact that he would not be speaking English, meaning that the audio would consist of the stilted tones of a simultaneous translator,â Tyndall observed.
It also helped that âthe overall structure of the coverage has been Kyiv-based,â in part due to Russiaâs enactment of strict censorship coverage that, among other things, made it much more difficult to cover Moscowâs views. âYet, more unusual for the American news media, there has been precious little coverage from Washington,â Tyndall observed. âNormally in a war in which the United States is not involved, it would be the default position of the American news media to search for a fair-and-balanced way to present both sides of the conflict. It is to Zelenskyâs credit that, this time, the networks had no problem seeing the conflict from his point of view.â
(...)
The Ukraine coverage in March also crowded out the latest developments in the devastating humanitarian crises caused by Afghanistanâs collapsed economy and the ongoing wars in Yemen and Ethiopia.
