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The Crisis in Journalism Is Here
Back in the early 1980’s two budding disasters were about to hit the media world — my career in television and the arrival of the personal computer. The first disaster was mitigated to a great degree but the second one is just now beginning to hit its stride. Let me explain.
One of the first things I did upon graduating with a degree in Mass Media was to purchase a subscription to Broadcasting magazine (now rebranded as Broadcasting & Cable) In the back section on electronic journalism in one issue was an article I remember as being titled, “The Coming Crisis in Journalism.” The author cautioned that digital compositing of images was going to reach a point where even the most cynical and demanding journalist could be duped into running a story that simply wasn’t true because he couldn’t deny the images he was being shown by a source.
In the late ’80s the Knoll brothers, Thomas (a Ph.D. student at Michigan) and John (a pioneer in image manipulation at Industrial Light and Magic), created Image-Pro, a set of computer tools that would eventually emerge commercially as Photoshop when they sold the idea to Adobe Software. But the “coming crisis” would prove slow in coming.
It wasn’t until home computer equipment became powerful enough to replicate the things folks were seeing in the movies that the real mischief was about to begin. Suddenly kids (and I do mean kids) were doing things in the basement that would have taken millions of dollars to pull off just a decade earlier. And not just in photography and graphic arts but in video as well.
Which brings us to today and the Age of Trump.
Donald Trump is an essential part of this equation, primarily because he is the most reviled political figure since Richard Nixon. Whereas George W. Bush had his share of lunatic detractors on the fringes of the far left, Trump has made the lunatics mainstream, not only on the left but on the right as well because he has upended decades of conservative dogma.
Bury My Heart on the Dakota Pipeline Access Project
Here’s the most recent example. When the President ordered a reversal of his predecessor’s decision not to build the Dakota Access Pipeline, someone took a publicity still from the 2007 HBO movie Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, cropped it, digitally added snow and haybales and announced to the world that the Feds and local LEOs were burning down the encampments set up by Native American protesters.
It was a little too clumsy. Not many professional journalists bit on that one but it still was widely shared on social media by the people who truly wanted to believe it was true.
One bit of fakery that was picked up originated with the husband and wife film making team of Laura Moss and Brendan O’Brien. Using public domain footage they created two “commercials” for the non-existent campaign of the President’s father for New York City mayor. After they were uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, independent producer Devin Landin shared them on Facebook with the following description, “See if you can catch all the subtle allusions in this ad for Fred Trump. (Spoiler: they’re not subtle at all!) What is it they say about apples and trees and distance?”
Hillary Clinton’s rabid chihuahua, Sidney Blumenthal ran with it from there. Writing in The London Review of Books, Blumenthal wrote:
In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son.
The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler, the man who writes their “Fact Checker” column shared them on Twitter until someone pointed out an anachronism in the videos. Supposedly produced in 1969 they carried “Paid For” disclaimers not in use until the early part of the 21st Century.
The London Review of Books deleted the reference in Blumenthal’s essay and put in this “correction”:
A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes.
Oh, my. They went full Dan Rather there, didn’t they? “Fake” but “accurate.”
Daniel Payne, writing in The Federalist, recently listed 16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won, which includes stories that were even repeated on this website.
Which brings me back to the Ivanka Trump/Nordstroms controversy from earlier this week. Two Wall Street Journal reporters wrote that it was purely a business decision and that was backed up by internal Nordstrom documents. Since no one from Nordstrom actually commented on the record, how did these reporters verify the provenance of these documents? Even if they had seen previous examples (that are no doubt computer-generated in the first place) would they know false documents if they saw them? Probably not. But because it ran in the Journal no one stops and asks if it’s true. I’m not saying that is or isn’t. But it was a single-sourced story and the track record of the truth is getting poorer and poorer. So, don’t disparage me if I take anything and everything with a grain of salt. No. These days I usually need a salt block.
It’s getting harder and harder to kick in the needed amnesia to believe anything that comes from the media. They’ve shot the wad of their credibility and we’re all poorer for it.
Published in Journalism
I think that the point EJ Hill made is getting lost. The “media” lies. They lie a lot and they do not deserve our trust. Since January 20 I have taken the posture of “believe nothing until at least 24 hours after it has happened and all the lies have been proven false”. They media can solve this problem by not lying, by not perpetuating myths like “Hands up don’t shoot” and “Gentle Giant”, by not lying about buying guns without a background check, by not perpetuating the myth of a “Muslim ban”. They can win our trust back but it’s going to take a lot of time because they have shown themselves repeatedly and consistently to be liars.
Agreed. Remember Jayson Blair?
One of the most depressing (to me) parts of that whole scandal was when the subjects of his fabricated stories were asked why they never said anything about the fabrications.
The replies were basically that they didn’t really expect accuracy.
I got in a feud with an editor of our local paper who was printing lies about my brother – my best friend (big time lawyer) and her husband (then big-time writer at the LAT) both sort of laughed and rolled their eyes that I believed the media cared one whit about accuracy.
Where’s the accountability on the false reporting on what Trump said? They are two million off. Highest known quote of him is 3 million. Maybe Trump is two million off also, but we know he’s speculating. He’s not misreporting like what the press is doing.
One thing that has been determined is that there are ZERO quotes of him in the press saying anything about 5 million. So the press is proven to be unprofessional and clearly misleading.
Mass voter fraud? 3 million out of 130,000,000 votes is somewhere between 2 and 3 % of all voters.
If 3 million is something massive. Then I’d say we have a super massive problem with illegal immigrants in this country if the 20 million figure is close to accurate. An incredibly massive number of illegals are registered to vote and Yeti and the press think it’s no biggie. Got it. There’s no evidence, and there won’t be any if the press has any say in the matter.
NBC, home of Brian “There I was, taking enemy fire” Williams, has been engaging in these shenanigans for over 20 years at least, and they didn’t need to wait for the digital revolution either. Remember the fake dead fish footage and the faked explosion of a GM truck? Well I do. This is from a 1993 article in the Buffalo News:
A Jan. 4 “NBC Nightly News” report on allegations that overcutting in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest was endangering fish inadvertently was accompanied by video tape of dead fish from another forest.
NBC’s correction came only after Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, blasted the network on the Senate floor, contending that NBC “twisted reality and sensationalized an issue.”
In both the GM case and this one NBC had to be dragooned into admitting it had erred.
Last week NBC News chief Michael Gartner announced his impending resignation.
As the head of NBC News, Gartner must accept the principal part of the blame for the disgrace his organization has brought on itself and on American journalism in general.
Obviously, there is something very, very wrong at NBC News.
http://buffalonews.com/1993/03/06/something-amiss-at-nbc-network/
They were typed on a Texas Air National Guard typewriter, the gold standard for document verification.
Well . . . we don’t have hard numbers about the whole country, but the Michigan recount was suggestive.
Based on numbers in Detroit at least 2672 “excess” votes were cast. These are votes for which no individual’s name exists in the poll books. They just magically appeared in precincts which went 95% for Hillary Clinton. There are 37 million people in the 25 largest cities in the United States. Based on Detroit’s performance we can expect around 4000 “extra” votes per million population or around 225,000 fraudulent votes cast in the nations largest cities.
I would say these are minimums because the Michigan recount was stopped – in part because of the vote discrepancies in Detroit. This is also just one kind of voter fraud – poll workers counting individual voters multiple times. This total ignores problems like the voters in NYC whose age is over 112, but are still voting (well over a 1000), non-citizens voting in US elections, US citizens voting in multiple states and the classic (for Oregon) folks scooping up mail-in ballots sent to other people and voting them. If only 1% of all foreign-born residents of the US are casting votes, that is another 400,000 votes cast illegally.
These are not numbers large enough to sway elections, but are significant.
Seawriter
(continued from previous post)
We are certainly not up to 3 to 5 million, but we are getting close to 1 million just counting non-citizen voting and likely over-counts. The problem is we don’t know because investigation into voter fraud has been blocked – on the state level in blue states, and by the federal Justice Department in red states. I don’t think more than one percent of all votes cast were cast fraudulently and illegally, but with 130+ millions votes cast in 2016, that would still be in excess of 1.3 million illegal votes.
It certainly could be lower, but it also certainly could be much higher, particularly in big cities, where fraud is easier to commit (especially if a voter can vote anywhere in the county and not at just one precinct).
It is worth noting that a 1% voting rate is typically not enough to change an election. (Based on Michigan recount results, even an apparent 4% rate of improper votes in Detroit was insufficient from keeping Trump from winning the state.) To dismiss vote fraud out of hand as insignificant or trivial seems unwarranted, however. The Michigan recount revealed enough improper voting to merit a serious investigation nationwide.
Seawriter
Then there’s those pesky Zimmerman 911 calls NBC FRAUDULENTLY edited to make him appear to be a racist.
It’s just too obvious.
If they would give these matters some good faith efforts, I would be less suspicious of their actual motives and intentions. They aren’t even trying anymore
Mass corporate media is agenda driven and is a lobbyist for itself. They own politicians from both parties. Look what happens when you call them out on their lies. They have been abusing trust and propagandizing as a matter of course.
It’s sad when we have so many people who are confused and bamboozled by them. They really believe what they are told without question.
This has been my policy for many years. It’s not necessarily that I think the journalists are intentionally lying. Everybody wants to be the first to get the big scoop. Verifying a story takes time and somebody will beat you if you don’t rush the story out. So when some sensational story breaks, particularly if there is a racial component to it (terrorizing of Indian protestors, white students gang-raping a black woman), I’ll give the story a day or two to be corrected before getting angry over an incident that maybe never happened.
The problem, of course, is by that time the lie has taken root. A member here on Ricochet reported that days after the MLK bust being removed story had been corrected, a significant number of his college students still believed it to be true.
I for one will never forgive the media for my dad going to his grave believing that people were yelling “kill him” (about then President Obama) at McCain rallies.
http://patch.com/new-hampshire/concord-nh/investigation-voter-affidavit-fraud-abandoned-nh-ag
By the way, here in New Hampshire students who are considered non-resident for the purposes of out-of-state tuition are at the same time considered residents for the purpose of registering to vote. So it it not “illegal” for a student who pays out-of-state tuition, who has no intention of staying in New Hampshire, to register to vote in New Hampshire, using an out-of-state driver license.
There were 7,500 affidavit votes cast in New Hampshire in November. That means the person either didn’t have any ID at all or had out-of state ID but swore (like, boy scout swore) that they were legal residents of New Hampshire.
Trump lost New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes. His loss is easily attributable to voter fraud.
Kelley Ayotte lost re-election by 743 votes. Do you really think that those out-of-state college students voted for a Republican? Or for Maggie “I love abortion” Hassan?
You can add academia to that list.
Voter fraud also occurs here in Washington state. The 2004 gubernatorial race is a prime example.
I thought you lived in Texas?
http://hotair.com/archives/2017/02/12/green-card-holder-sentenced-for-imaginary-voter-fraud-in-texas/
I used to, and yes, voter fraud has long been a problem there. Still is, as you can see.
No one is arguing that voter fraud doesn’t exist. Lots of people are arguing that it does not exist anywhere near the scale that the person who WON the 2016 election says it did.
I think John Fund’s main point is that it’s easy and it’s often invisible and no one is watching the store so we have to use other ways to estimate things.
I live in Washington state and watched new votes roll in with each recount for Dino Rossi’s first attempt at being governor. The vote counting system is more suspect the closer things get to the bastions of Democratic Power.
Since things are hard to count and we know that the Dems are doing this in a serious fashion I refuse to believe that it’s not a problem.
Did you leave this thread open on a public computer? Somebody attacked him using your account.
The media is the opposition party to the Republicans. They are our political enemies and we need to fight them with that understanding. They are not professionals and because we have so many people on our side telling us there’s not a problem with the media (or it’s overblown) a relatively small but determined set of Bolshevik like elements have way too much power — and that combined with their anti-Americanism has to be dealt with seriously. Thank God for Steve Bannon, David Horowitz and Donald Trump!
Oh, and Ann Coulter!
Nope.
I do not think of Sean Hannity as a particarly impeccable source for news, but, I heard a few minutes of his show today, and he said something that is relevant to this discussion.
Hannity claimed that he has an anonymous source that is well-positioned within Nordstrom, and who confirmed to him that politics was definitely part of their decision regarding Ivanka Trump’s line of apparel.
With all due respect, Sean Hannity is the Baghdad Bob of the Trump Administration.
With all due respect, @mjbubba sufficiently equivocated Sean Hannity’s credibility. A simple “like” will do.
Of course it was due to politics. Those numbers were hot off the press? The decision to drop Ivanka had to happen right now! This minute!?
Back to @ejhill‘s OP, the provenance of the claim it had nothing to do with politics is questionable at best. Sean Hannity now has a conflicting source.
I’ll see your source and raise you.
I have a source in Chappaquea who says Hillary Clinton is totally drunk right now.
Na Zdorovie!
First, do not ever use the word “source” and Sean Hannity in the same sentence. He makes a mockery of that word.
Second, if you rail on me for two dozen comments (which is perfectly fine, by the way — all for it) about the complicity of the media with a political agenda and their lack of accuracy, please for all that is holy do not hold up Sean freaking Hannity as your example of how the press ought to behave.
First of all, I did not hold up Sean Freaking Hannity as MY example of how the press ought to behave. No one in this conversation has.
Second of all @mjbubba sufficiently equivocated about Sean Hannity. But I repeat myself.
Third of all, if you think this is “railing”, for “two dozen comments” you either can’t count or you can’t read.
Fourth of all, you said: ” … the complicity of the media with a political agenda and their lack of accuracy, please for all that is holy do not hold up Sean freaking Hannity as your example of how the press ought to behave.”
I did not use Sean Hannity as an example of anything. Nor did @mjbubba. Nor has anyone else.
I have made several comments on this thread. And I’m more than willing to discuss any of them. Am not willing to discuss or defend comments I have not made.