Dear Media: Media Crit Like It’s Football, FFS

/39 Comments/in , , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I’ve been fuming about this since — oh, check the date and time on this graphic:

For the NFL football or Michigan uninformed, the Detroit Lions played the Buffalo Bills on Sunday evening at home. The hometown crowd was amped up because the Lions had a 12-1 season and already garnered a playoff slot.

But they also knew things would be tense because of the number of injured players on the team.

The Bills opened up a 14-point lead in the first quarter and the Lions were never able to catch them; the final score was 48-42.

That’s the frame from which the above report in Gannett’s local affiliate the Detroit Free Press (Freep) reported on CBS Sports’ coverage of the game.

Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the US; it’s the owner and publisher of USA Today and 32 other news papers. Freep’s criticism of CBS Sports coverage follows decades of CBS missteps in the Detroit market.

During what little I watched of the game, CBS’s talking heads were shit. Very little commentary on a couple lousy calls, or not-calls, in at least one case of pass interference early in the game.

I won’t bother to post his crap here but commentator Tony Romo was a dick, not exactly endearing CBS to the Detroit Metro audience. You’d think he’d know by now there’s quarterback smack talk and then there’s former player professional broadcaster sports talk, the latter for which he is paid.

All that aside, this article does more to criticize another media outlet’s coverage than we have seen among national outlets who have systematically fucked up coverage for decades.

How and why can a large newspaper owned by a national organization freely criticize a national broadcast and streaming media organization about its coverage, but the same kinds of organizations have failed our democracy by bootlicking for fascists?

By bootlicking I offer as an example ABC News which folded like a broken lawn chair settling $15 million on Trump who’d claimed he was defamed by ABC. ABC had used the same language leveled at Trump in court but somehow a national news broadcaster is no longer permitted to exercise free speech reporting facts in Trumplandia.

After the gross moral and ethical failure of the Washington Post to make an endorsement in the presidential race, after Los Angeles Times’ similar failing, one can only wonder what’s left of the country’s once-free press.

Don’t get me started on the bullshit coverage which parroted right-wing talking points over the last three presidential elections, from “But her emails” to “Joe’s old” to “Hunter Biden Hunter Biden Hunter Biden.”

NYU’s Jay Rosen has encouraged news media to depart from its toxic horse race coverage of elections and move toward reporting the stakes of the race. Stakes coverage should be a minimum across all coverage of politics and governance.

If media can’t do that — and they’ve demonstrated they can’t — if they insist on treating our democratic governance like sports, the least they can do is criticize their own industry’s performance like they do when it comes to football.

 

This is an open thread.

39 replies
  1. Rugger_9 says:

    Barkbarkwoofwoof called in Charlie Pierce (who is usually behind a paywall) to make observations about the suit filed against the Des Moines Register and their pollster saying that Iowa was in play. I would add that if this is ‘the day Convict-1 became President’, ye gods. It follows a pattern by ABC caving before getting their deposition (wonder what other ‘pro quos’ are involved with the owner) and by the LA TImes where the owner has preemptively inserted himself as the filter on any op-eds involving Convict-1.

    It’s an indictment of how much of the media is owned by so few entities who are run by oligarchs protecting one of their own because they can. You can thank Bill Clinton and his signing of the Communications Act in 1999 for the removal of the guardrails. The Ds will not prevail until fairness is re-established in the media world.

    https://barkbarkwoofwoof.com/2024/12/first-you-sue/

    • Rayne says:

      I’d like to know how Trump was damaged by the Des Moines Register and pollster seeing as he was elected.

      In ABC’s case they likely caved because Disney has been trying to sell them and Disney doesn’t want more hassle. Still no excuse but I think it explains the capitulation in advance.

    • dopefish says:

      I didn’t know what your reference to the LA Times’ owner was about, until I noticed this story at The Guardian:
      LA Times owner asks editorial board to ‘take a break’ from writing about Trump

      The U.S. needs non-billionaire-owned media badly. Real journalists at that paper should just ignore his request and force him to fire them, and then make a stink about it when it happens. At the moment it feels like authoritarianism is going to consume the U.S. and bring total chaos, and the billionaire class is just going to pal around and watch it happen.

  2. thesmokies says:

    Yes. And if the media care about the story of the division in this country, why are they so afraid to describe and explain how much Fox News has contributed to that division? That’s one of the biggest stories of the last 30 years.

  3. rosalind says:

    as we watch people lose their minds over the drone invasion, i offer the simplest explanation: obviously the airplanes the super secret Department of Chemtrails has been using have aged out, and they’ve replaced them with drones. /s (ducking & running)

    =====

    that said, while i do concede many of our citizens have no clue about the night sky (heavy sigh) i am enjoying the new interest in how many flipping private drones have been allowed to take to our skies. a subject that is a particularly sore one for me as i have caught drones filming me through my upper floor window at night two times already. no way to chase down the culprit as they zoom off into the darkness. the sense of violation is off the charts.

    • ExRacerX says:

      Yeah, the conspiracy nuts are going even nuttier on this one.

      It’s reminiscent of the “flying saucer” mass hysteria of the late ’40s.

      • Epicurus says:

        I was caught in a dreaded US 95 traffic jam in southern VA a couple years ago. No news of the cause except from curious stranded travelers who had walked forward to see what they could see. Suddenly drones appeared! Maybe thirty or so wound up circling overhead around what had been a collision about a half mile ahead. They had been sent/reconning from the cars behind to see what the situation was. Last exit was back about two or three miles. So I could watch the drones return to the cars and then look back and see people turning around and going back to the exit in the breakdown lane, at least those in the right hand lane. Fascinating.

        • RMD De Plume says:

          [major auto manufacturer strategy meeting]
          “what are your plans for next year’s releases?”
          — one idea is to equip specially-outfitted editions with drones that can be launched and retrieved from a moving vehicle–with video feeds displayed on interior monitors.
          “what the hell do they need that for!”
          — traffic jams, of course….and other stuff

  4. Error Prone says:

    How about those Vikings! Monday Night featured.

    You score over 40 points aren’t your supposed to win?

    Aside from partisan feelings, have you noticed how bad football coverage is? Generically. They televise it as if the guys in the trailer switching between cameras hate the game. Closeups of a coach in a booth or on the sidelines, of the crowd, ignore the huddle breaking and what offensive and defensive alignments are, just catch the play last moment, etc. You want politics covered like that? Guys in the trailer switching cameras while hating politics?

    Would you want a sideline Suzie at a presidential debate, telling you about somebody’s mother in the crowd, quick get the camera on her?

    I did think Allen did a good job, whatever it was the commentators were saying.

    • Rayne says:

      “Would you want a sideline Suzie at a presidential debate, telling you about somebody’s mother in the crowd, quick get the camera on her?”

      Do you really think coverage of presidential debates has been much better than this when the media focuses not on the content of the debates but on whether the participants look old or not, and then proceed to double down for a month on whether one of the candidate’s performances looked old, indifferent to the bullshit the other candidate spewed?

      Do you really think coverage is any different when the major news outlets all did this same thing and none of them criticized another outlet’s coverage?

  5. Error Prone says:

    You got me searching the web. I’d offer these fan opinions: https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/readers/2024/12/17/lions-season-ticket-price-increase-ford-field-sheila-hamp-super-bowl/77012624007/

    We’d want similar popular attention to and passions about the people who bought Trump, how things will be priced now that he’s had a good season. Finally, those with him in hard 2020 times, will he treat them right?

    These are two different worlds. Passions about politics among the general population are not as strong as sports passions. But the similarity I see, both areas, stripped to the essence, are a business with winning and losing teams. There were the Reagan years, then there were the Obama years, each team having its better or worse days, depending on how the insiders planned and managed the draft.

    • Rayne says:

      It’s called Economics 101, very nearly the beginning of the semester when students are introduced to the concepts of Supply and Demand.

      For a very long time Detroit fans have been used to slack demand for tickets. Now they are meeting the pointy end of Supply and Demand and they want a sparkle pony to magically produce more seats to reduce pressure on pricing.

      Not to mention the increased pressures on the team and stadium for services and maintenance that popularity bring with them — there will certainly be increases costs to operate which ticket revenues must cover. The stadium already does a lot of fan service to meet additional needs, like the massive indoor screening last year of the Lions’ last away game.

      WRT to your crack about Reagan versus Obama years: you’re also forgetting the NFL is a cartel, and ownership is the element which doesn’t change with the draft. The reason the Lions have languished for decades had much to do with ownership which was stagnant in its demands on team management. Not at all the same as voting in a new president in response to socioeconomic conditions.

      You know when the Lions’ fortunes began to change in earnest, in spite of several weak feints between 2014-2020 after majority-owner of 50 years William Clay Ford Sr. died? When his daughter succeeded him and his wife as majority owner. Good for the Lions, not so good as a practice for a democratic republic.

  6. Ed Walker says:

    I don’t think ABC would have lost. But even if an angry Trump judge gave instructions so rigid the jurors felt they had to rule for him, the damages would be $10. How can you hurt the reputation of that vulgar toad?

    • Rayne says:

      Clearly what ABC has done in its coverage didn’t make a scratch in Trump’s PFA-based coating. It was a SLAPP suit and ABC shouldn’t have yielded to the suppression of their public participation especially as media.

      Which does bring up a point: media companies need to move their offices to states where anti-SLAPP laws are strongest if they’re going to survive Trump’s dementia-addled lawyer-enabled tantrums.

  7. rosalind says:

    and now the unelected bazillionaire is claiming victory for tanking the plan to avert a gov’t shutdown. over on bluesky adam bonin cautions: “There is a real chance that there is no Speaker on January 6, 2025 which would put us in crazy uncharted legal waters…” and “Until there is a Speaker, the members can’t get sworn in.”

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      There’s a new Congress every two years. Its first meeting is always on January 3rd, which is when its members are sworn in. When a president is elected every four years, Electoral College votes are formally counted and announced in a joint session on Jan. 6th.

      It would make no sense for the House GOP to revolt against the Speaker until after the EC votes are counted and Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20th. If there’s no budget and no Speaker on Jan. 20th, how does the USG hold its swearing in ceremony?

    • dopefish says:

      Politico has a story up that describes how “Musk used his social network X to stir Republicans into a frenzy over the stopgap spending bill filed the night before by House Speaker Mike Johnson” — sending over 100 tweets that included “a number of misleading or outright false claims” including the claim that members of Congress would get a 40 percent pay raise as part of the package. (Apparently the actual pay adjustment is closer to 3.8 percent)

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        After a lot of invented drama, President Elmo establishes his dominance, Trump eats ketchup, important things, like funding research and treatment of childhood cancer, get thrown out, and the govt gets funded for a few more months.

  8. harpie says:

    Thanks for this open THREAD, Rayne.

    I’ve been attempting to keep up with [swings arms about wildly] ALL THIS,
    and every morning I’m back at the bottom of the mountain. I’m tired.

    My answer: I’ll just post some of the things I found important, interesting.

    From ProPublica, [FIVE days ago]:

    https://bsky.app/profile/propublica.org/post/3ldeh2fmoem2q
    December 15, 2024 at 1:30 PM

    We’re investigating health insurance denials.
    If you want to share your insights, here’s how: [LINK]

    • harpie says:

      ALSO:
      Find out why your health insurer denied your claim.
      ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage. Get your claim file before submitting an appeal. https://projects.propublica.org/claimfile/
      [NOTE: This free tool is part of our “Uncovered” series on health insurance denials. Please note that ProPublica is unable to provide any legal advice about claim files. We are journalists and not lawyers.]

  9. harpie says:

    From SIX days ago: Refer to news orgs by their *OWNERSHIP*

    https://bsky.app/profile/mediaanddemocracy.bsky.social/post/3ldcrnu6dvk2x
    December 14, 2024 at 9:34 PM

    Corporate media ownership *always* has an agenda of its own.
    Democracy is never the prime directive:

    Disney-ABC News
    Comcast-NBC News
    Paramount-CBS News
    Time-Warner-CNN
    Murdoch-Fox
    –
    Smith-Sinclair
    Murdoch-WSJ
    Bezos-WaPo
    AGSulzberger-NYT
    Soon-Shiong-LATimes

    Refer to news orgs by their *OWNERSHIP*

  10. harpie says:

    From THREE days ago: TRUMP sues Gannett [Des Moines Register] and Selzer.

    Will Bunch:
    https://bsky.app/profile/willbunch.bsky.social/post/3ldjphajuak2z
    December 17, 2024 at 3:44 PM

    1. Here’s the thing about Trump and that lawsuit against the Des Moines Register.

    All his legal actions before now have been against the giants like ’60 Minutes’ or ABC, which might have had journalists in the next tiers down thinking, ‘They won’t ever get to us.’
    […]
    3. Team Trump got lucky in the ABC case and they’d never prevail in court against the Iowa Poll or with most of this nonsense, but their only real goal is to intimidate aggressive journalism.

    I’m very much afraid these stunts are going to get exactly what Trump wants

    Dan Kennedy:
    https://bsky.app/profile/dankennedy-nu.bsky.social/post/3ldjrgrq5bf2i
    December 17, 2024 at 4:19 PM

    In suing the Des Moines Register, Trump is suing Gannett, the largest newspaper owner in the country and the publisher of USA Today — and a company that is economically fragile thanks largely to mismanagement and greed. This is about a lot more than one medium-sized paper.

    • harpie says:

      Charles Pierce:
      https://bsky.app/profile/theshebeen.bsky.social/post/3ldjspdjjtk27
      December 17, 2024 at 4:41 PM

      Also one that is notorious for hanging its employees out to dry under pressure.

      AND from YESTERDAY:

      https://bsky.app/profile/bgrueskin.bsky.social/post/3ldqdlj4jus2a
      December 20, 2024 at 7:00 AM

      Gannett, owner of the Des Moines Register, won’t publicly commit to paying legal costs for Ann Sel[t]zer, the pollster being sued by Trump.

      This is ominous, especially in light of the capitulation last week by Disney/ABC, which is vastly better resourced than Gannett.
      [< I think this is a gift NYT Link]

      A Famed Iowa Pollster’s Career Ends With a ‘Spectacular Miss’ and a Trump Lawsuit Known for her “gold standard” polls of Iowans, J. Ann Selzer is facing retribution from Donald Trump after her final 2024 survey showed a surprising, and ultimately wrong, winner.
      Jonathan Weisman Dec. 19, 2024

      [“Retribution“]

    • harpie says:

      Max Kennerly links to a possible different explanation:

      https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3ldtgayzi6k2o
      December 21, 2024 at 12:25 PM

      Yeah, I think this is right. Gannett may yet chicken out, but they have strategic reason to right now maintain separation between themselves and Selzer, so they can make this removal stick.

      Also big LOL on Trump’s lawyers not having their act together to serve Selzer immediately. Whoops! [LINK]

      The linked posibilty begins with:

      * Possible * context. To remove this to federal court, Gannett relies on a doctrine which requires that Selzer hasn’t been served yet. […][Document]

  11. harpie says:

    Chris GEIDNER from FOUR days ago:

    Adeel Mangi WOULD HAVE BEEN “the nation’s first Muslim American federal appeals court judge”

    Adeel Mangi’s letter to America
    Biden’s stalled Third Circuit nominee, Mangi spoke out in a fiery — and needed — four-page letter. Also: The clock is ticking on TikTok. (Sorry.)
    https://www.lawdork.com/p/adeel-mangi-letter-third-circuit-nominee
    Chris Geidner Dec 16, 2024

    On Monday, 13 months after President Joe Biden announced that Adeel Mangi would be his nominee for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Mangi issued a searing indictment of a system that has left him as the longest-pending appellate nominee in the nation.

    “I have battled for justice, even if it meant there would be none for me,“ Mangi wrote in the letter [LINK], acknowledging there is “no pathway to confirmation” at this point.

    Later, he summed up his four-page letter — which, bless him, included many links — with a damning, direct assessment, writing:

    [W]e have a fundamentally broken process for choosing federal judges. This is no longer a system for evaluating fitness for judicial office. It is now a channel for the raising of money based on performative McCarthyism before video cameras, and for the dissemination of dark-money-funded attacks that especially target minorities. Nominees pay the price and so too does our nation.

    • harpie says:

      Geidner TODAY on Dem report re: ROBERTS COURTesan ethics dearth:

      Breaking: Senate Dems’ report on SCOTUS ethics inquiry decries “culture of misconduct” Judiciary Dems’ majority staff report calls for Congress to act given that “the justices have allowed ethical misconduct to persist for decades.” https://www.lawdork.com/p/senate-judiciary-dems-scotus-ethics-report
      Chris Geidner 12/21/24

      […] Although the investigation is coming to an end because the Democrats are losing the majority in January, Durbin released the 93-page majority staff report [LINK] detailing what they were able to find — and also making public more than 800 pages of relevant supporting documents.

      “[T]he Supreme Court has allowed a culture of misconduct to metastasize into a full-blown crisis that has driven public opinion of the Court to historic lows,” the report states. “Justices appointed by presidents of both parties have engaged in conduct that ranges from questionable to clearly violative of federal ethics laws, and several justices have done so consistently without suffering negative consequences.” […]

  12. harpie says:

    From FIVE days ago: The New York Young Republicans Club gala:

    https://bsky.app/profile/joshkovensky.bsky.social/post/3ldf7b2ef5k2x
    December 15, 2024 at 8:43 PM

    I’m here at the NY Young Republican gala w @hunterw.bsky.social, as Raheem Kassam calls Trump the 45, 46, and 47 President to raucous applause on “46” [PHOTO]

    Jeff Clark of DoJ 2020 coup attempt fame is here; as is Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. He did not want to talk to me [PHOTO]

    It’s a weird mix of people: random New Yorkers seeking out a place to Be Republican, but also foreign political factions seeking to get an in w MAGA

    One of the first people I met was a man named Forrest Zhou, who introduced himself to me as a “friend of Steve Bannon’s” and “general secretary of the New Federal State of China,” a government-in-exile Bannon created w the now-indicted Guo Wengui [THREAD continues]

  14. harpie says:

    From SEVEN days ago in Fake “Intelligence” News:

    BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno Graham Fraser 12/13/24

    The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant’s new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.

    Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, [link > Apple Press Release 12/11/24] uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

    This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

    A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.

    Apple declined to comment. […]

    From YESTERDAY in Fake “Intelligence” News:

    Apple urged to axe AI feature after false headline https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2v778x85yo
    Graham Fraser Technology reporter 12/19/24

    […] Now, the group Reporters Without Borders [RSF]
    has called on Apple to remove the technology. [LINK]

    Apple has made no comment. […]

    • harpie says:

      Links to:
      RSF urges Apple to remove its new generative AI feature after it wrongly attributes false information to the BBC, threatening reliable journalism https://rsf.org/en/rsf-urges-apple-remove-its-new-generative-ai-feature-after-it-wrongly-attributes-false-information
      Vincent Berthier Head of RSF’s Technology and Journalism Desk

      “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs. The European AI Act — despite being the most advanced legislation in the world in this area — did not classified information-generating AIs as high-risk systems, leaving a critical legal vacuum. This gap must be filled immediately.”

  17. harpie says:

    1/20/24

    6:11 PM WSJ: Biden Weighs Commuting Sentences of Death Row Inmates
    Amid pleas from religious and civil-rights groups, president is considering whether to convert death sentences to life without parole

    7:19 PM Chris GEIDNER:
    https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3ldrmvjke5s2v

    NEWS: WSJ is reporting that Biden is considering death row commutations for “most, if not all,” of the 40 men on federal death row — and that Garland has recommended the “most.” WSJ says those who could be excluded, if any are, likely would be Tsarnaev, Roof, and Bowers. [WSJ [possible share] LINK here] [THREAD]

    7:35 PM William SHAKESPEARE [of BlueSky]:
    https://bsky.app/profile/shakespeare.bsky.social/post/3ldrnt26sq42k

    And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
    When mercy seasons justice.

Comments are closed.