Friday, March 15, 2024

Why Is The Media Against Republicans

Don't Miss




Mcconnell And Co Are Playing As Dirty A Game As Possible In Their Quest To Fill Ginsburgs Seat Before The Election But You Wont Find That Story In Most News Coverage

US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell at a press conference at the US Capitol on September 22, 2020. McConnell said in a statement that the Senate would take up President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Subscribe to The Nation

Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter

Fridays

The Nation


Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter

MondaysThe Nation

The Nationlatest issue

Subscribe to The Nation

Support Progressive Journalism

The Nation

Sign up for our Wine Club today.

The Nation

The argument against confirming Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court before the inauguration is a Republican argument. They invented it, they enacted it, and they own it. That’s because it was Republicans, not Democrats, who changed the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to eight for 10 months in 2016, when a Democratic president was in the White House. It was Republicans who argued that no Supreme Court nominee should even be considered by the Senate in an election year. And it was Republicans who promised to block the confirmation of Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees in the event that she became president while Republicans retained control of the Senate.


Current Issue

View our current issue

More from Mystal

Elie Mystal

And that argument is simply untenable. We do not have a legitimate third branch of government if only one party gets to choose its members.

For Reprints and Permissions, click


Vaccine Advocacy From Hannity And Mcconnell Gets The Media Off Republicans’ Backs But Won’t Shift Public Sentiment

Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson

Amid a rising media furor over the steady stream of vaccine disparagement from GOP politicians and Fox News talking heads, a number of prominent Republicans spoke up in favor of vaccines early this week.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible” and asked that people “ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, got the vaccine after months of delay and then publicly said, “there shouldn’t be any hesitancy over whether or not it’s safe and effective.” And Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a widely shared video, declared, it “absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.” This was treated in the press as an unequivocal endorsement, even though the use of the word “many” was clearly meant to let the Fox News viewers feel like he’s talking about other people getting vaccinated. 

Is this an exciting pivot among the GOP elites?  Are they abandoning the sociopathic strategy of sabotaging President Joe Biden’s anti-pandemic plan by encouraging their own followers to get sick? Are the millions of Republicans who keep telling pollsters they will never get that Democrat shot going to change their minds now? 


Ha ha ha, no.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

— Matthew Gertz July 20, 2021

The Technology 202: New Report Calls Conservative Claims Of Social Media Censorship ‘a Form Of Disinformation’

with Aaron Schaffer

A new report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them. 


arrow-right

Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend former president Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.” 

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of Trump were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given Trump’s position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election. 


In The Past The Gop Would Be Rallying Their Voters Against This Bill Their Failure To Do So Now Is Ominous

Mitch ?McConnell, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro

With surprising haste for the U.S. Senate, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just after passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. And Democrats could not be more excited, as the blueprint covers a whole host of long-standing priorities, from fighting climate change to creating universal prekindergarten. The blueprint was largely written by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who released a statement calling it “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.”

Sanders isn’t putting that much spin on the ball.

While the bill fallls short of what is really needed to deal with climate change, it is still tremendously consequential legislation that will do a great deal not just to ameliorate economic inequalities, but, in doing so, likely reduce significant gender and racial inequality. It’s also a big political win for President Joe Biden. In other words, it is everything that Republicans hate. Worse for them, it’s packed full of benefits that boost the middle class, not just the working poor. Traditionally, such programs are much harder to claw back once Republicans gain power — as they’ve discovered in previous failed attempts to dismantle Social Security and Obamacare


Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

But that’s not really happening here. 

The Actual Reason Why Republicans And Their Media Are Discouraging People From Getting Vaccinated

Opinion

Independent Media Institute

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?


there’s always a reason

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this is happening.”

But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.

Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:

1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?


2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?

3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”

4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status ?

Death is their electoral strategy.

Is there any other possible explanation?

So, what’s left?

Destroying Trust In The Media Science And Government Has Left America Vulnerable To Disaster

For America to minimize the damage from the current pandemic, the media must inform, science must innovate, and our government must administer like never before. Yet decades of politically-motivated attacks discrediting all three institutions, taken to a new level by President Trump, leave the American public in a vulnerable position.

jonmladd

Trump has consistently vilified the national media. When campaigning, he the media “absolute scum” and “totally dishonest people.” As president, he has news organizations “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” over and over. The examples are endless. Predictably, he has blamed the coronavirus crisis on the media, saying “We were very prepared. The only thing we weren’t prepared for was the media.”

Science has been another Trump target. He has gutted scientific expertise and administrative capacity in the executive branch, most notably failing to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Centers for Disease Control itself and disbanding the National Security Council’s taskforce on pandemics. During the coronavirus crisis, he has routinely disagreed with scientific experts, including, in the AP’s words, his “musing about injecting disinfectants into people .” This follows his earlier public advocacy for hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, also against leading scientists’ advice. Coupled with his flip-flopping on when to lift stay-at-home orders, the president has created confusion and endangered people.

Media Bias Against Conservatives Is Real And Part Of The Reason No One Trusts The News Now

Members of the media were shocked as he was supposedly revealed as incredibly anti-woman presidential candidate, perhaps even the most ever nominated by a major political party in the modern era. He had admitted that he reduced women to objects and the Democrats pounced, seeking to make him lose him the support of women and, in turn, the presidency.

I’m not talking about the media coverage of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and the “Access Hollywood” tape, but his predecessor, Mitt Romney.

His sin? Saying that he had “binders full of women” that he was looking at appointing to key positions were he elected president. Sure, it was an awkward way of stating a fairly innocuous fact about how elected executives begin their transition efforts — with resumes of candidates for every position under the sun —- well before an election is held. Yet, the media and commentators came for Mitt Romney and they did so with guns blazing, as he was portrayed as an anti-woman extremist… for making a concerted effort to hire women to serve in his administration as governor of Massachusetts.

There Is No Liberal Media Bias In Which News Stories Political Journalists Choose To Cover

  • 1Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
  • 2University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
  • 3Brigham Young University-Idaho, Rexburg, ID 83460, USA.
  • ?*Corresponding author. Email: hans.hassellfsu.edu ; jh5akvirginia.edu
    • ?† These authors contributed equally to this work.

    See allHide authors and affiliations

    ‘it’s Time To End This Forever War’ Biden Says Forces To Leave Afghanistan By 9/11

    The enormous national anger generated by those attacks was also channeled by the administration toward the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was conceived to prevent any recurrence of attacks on such a massive scale. Arguments over that legislation consumed Congress through much of 2002 and became the fodder for campaign ads in that year’s midterms.

    The same anger was also directed toward a resolution to use force, if needed, in dealing with security threats from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That authorization passed Congress with bipartisan majorities in the fall of 2002, driven by administration claims that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction.” It became law weeks before the midterm elections.

    Once those elections were over, the Republicans in control of both chambers finally agreed to create an independent commission to seek answers about 9/11. Bush signed the legislation on Nov. 27, 2002.

    The beginning was hobbled when the first chairman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and vice chairman, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, decided not to continue. But a new chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, and vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, filled the breach and performed to generally laudatory reviews.

    Long memories

    Top House Republican Opposes Bipartisan Commission To Investigate Capitol Riot

    But McCarthy replied by opposing Katko’s product, and more than 80% of the other House Republicans did too. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., initially said he was keeping an open mind but then announced that he too was opposed. This makes it highly unlikely that 10 of McConnell’s GOP colleagues will be willing to add their votes to the Democrats’ and defeat a filibuster of the bill.

    Republicans have argued that two Senate committees are already looking at the events of Jan. 6, as House panels have done as well. The Justice Department is pursuing cases against hundreds of individuals who were involved. Former President Donald Trump and others have said any commission ought to also be tasked to look at street protests and violence that took place in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

    But with all that on the table, several Republicans have alluded to their concern about a new commission “dragging on” into 2022, the year of the next midterm elections. “A lot of our members … want to be moving forward,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 2 Senate Republican toMcConnell. “Anything that gets us rehashing to 2020 elections is, I think, a day lost.”

    Resistance even after 9/11

    The Taliban were toppled but bin Laden escaped, and U.S. forces have been engaged there ever since. The troop numbers have declined in recent years, and President Biden has indicated that all combat troops will be out by this year’s anniversary of the 2001 attacks.

    Opiniontrump And His Voters Are Drawn Together By A Shared Sense Of Defiance

    Americans in general have begun to catch on: 66 percent of Americans believe that the media has a hard time separating fact from opinion and, according to a recent Gallup poll, 62 percent of the country believes that the press is biased one way or the other in their reporting.

    So when CNN, NBC News, Fox News, or another outlet break a hard news story, there is a good chance that a large swathe of the public won’t view it as legitimate news.

    And politicians, right and left, are taking advantage of this.

    The entire ordeal is part of an ever-growing list of examples in which the media seemed to be biased, whether consciously or not, against Republicans.

    Before Donald Trump, there was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in 2014 accused the media of “dividing us” because they asked him about some protesters who had chanted “NYPD is the KKK” and . He also accused the media of McCarthyism when they dug into the personal life of an aide of his, who reportedly had a relationship with a convicted murderer. The mayor also publicly and privately accused Bloomberg News of being biased against him, since it is owned by his predecessor. However, de Blasio is not terribly popular within his own party, so Democrats in New York did not buy what he was selling.

    The Media Has Entered The Republicans Pounce Stage Of Critical Race Theory

    Now that polls show a majority of Americans oppose Critical Race Theory, the Democratic Party and their scribes in the legacy media have launched a rearguard action against parents — by casting them as the aggressors. As is true every time the Left misfires or overreaches, the media ignore the offense and focus on the popular backlash in a tactic popularly known as “Republicans pounce.”

    Media coverage proves that CRT has entered the “Republicans pounce” stage. Witness the words of one Politico writer, who said on Thursday, “he right is hoping to capitalize on the grassroots angst over critical race theory and excite its base voters in next year’s midterms.” Chris Hayes, who has the unenviable position of competing directly with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, agreed Thursday night that all the Republican Party’s “rhetorical fire has moved away from the deficit and on to some random, school superintendent in Maine after his district dared to denounce white supremacy after the murder of George Floyd.”

    But why are grassroots Americans so filled with “angst”? Because they are intellectually deficient and, of course, racist, according to Vox.com.

    “Conservatives have launched a growing disinformation campaign around the academic concept” of CRT. “It’s an attempt to push back against progress,” wrote Vox.com reporter Fabiola Cineas. The problem is that “Republicans … want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.”

    Trump Continues To Push Election Falsehoods Here’s Why That Matters

    ‘Trump is forever’: Conservative lays out 4 main reasons ...

    Republican opposition to the commission

    Rice was featured in one of the very few congressional commissions ever to receive this level of attention. Most are created and live out their mission with little notice. Indeed, Congress has created nearly 150 commissions of various kinds in just the last 30 years, roughly five a year.

    Some have a highly specific purpose, such as a commemoration. Others are more administrative, such as the five-member commission overseeing the disbursement of business loans during the early months of pandemic lockdown in 2020. Others have been wide-ranging and controversial, such as the one created to investigate synthetic opioid trafficking.

    In the initial weeks after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the idea of an independent commission to probe the origins of the attack and the failures that let it happen seemed a no-brainer. It had broad support both in Congress and in public opinion polls. It still enjoys the latter, as about two-thirds of Americans indicate that they think an independent commission is needed. The idea has fared well — particularly when described as being “9/11 Commission style.”

    Opiniona Guide For Frustrated Conservatives In The Age Of Trump

    Conscious bias or not, such practices do not engender trust in the media amongst conservatives. They only reinforce the belief that the media seeks to defend their ideological allies on the left and persecute those on the right while claiming to be objective.

    This idea that the media is made up of unselfconsciously liberal elites who don’t even recognize the biases they have against conservative policies and conservatives in general goes back decades, to when newsrooms were more or less homogenous in nearly every way. At first, conservatives fought back by founding their own magazines; after Watergate and in the midst of the Reagan administration and liberals’ contempt for him, organizations like the Media Research Center began cataloguing the myriad examples of biased coverage, both large and small.

    And there was a lot to catalogue, from opinion pages heavily weighted in favor of liberals to reportage and analysis that looks a lot more like the opinion of the writers than unbiased coverage.

    Despite Cries Of Censorship Conservatives Dominate Social Media

    GOP-friendly voices far outweigh liberals in driving conversations on hot topics leading up to the election, a POLITICO analysis shows.

    The Twitter app on a mobile phone | Matt Rourke/AP Photo

    10/27/2020 01:38 PM EDT

    • Link Copied

    Republicans have turned alleged liberal bias in Silicon Valley into a major closing theme of the election cycle, hauling tech CEOs in for virtual grillings on Capitol Hill while President Donald Trump threatens legal punishment for companies that censor his supporters.

    But a POLITICO analysis of millions of social media posts shows that conservatives still rule online.

    Right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets and other GOP supporters dominate online discussions around two of the election’s hottest issues, the Black Lives Matter movement and voter fraud, according to the review of Facebook posts, Instagram feeds, Twitter messages and conversations on two popular message boards. And their lead isn’t close.

    As racial protests engulfed the nation after George Floyd’s death, users shared the most-viral right-wing social media content more than 10 times as often as the most popular liberal posts, frequently associating the Black Lives Matter movement with violence and accusing Democrats like Joe Biden of supporting riots.

    Politifact Va: No Republicans Didn’t Vote To Defund The Police

    Rep. Bobby Scott speaks at a 2015 criminal justice forum.

    Speaker: Bobby ScottStatement: “Every Republican in Congress voted to defund the police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan.”Date: July 12Setting: Twitter

    In last fall’s campaigns, Republicans thundered often inaccurate charges that Democrats wanted to defund police departments.

    U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., is flipping the script and saying that all congressional Republicans voted to defund police this year when they opposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.

    “Every Republican in Congress voted to defund police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan,” Scott tweeted on July 12.

    Scott represents Virginia’s 3rd congressional district, stretching from Norfolk and parts of Chesapeake north through Newport News and west through Franklin.

    His claim, echoing a Democratic talking point, melts under scrutiny. Here’s why.

    The Facts

    The term “defunding police” arose after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Many advocates say it does not mean abolishing police, but rather reallocating some of the money and the duties that have traditionally been handled by police departments.

    Scott’s explanation

    Barbera sent an NBC article noting that communities in at least 10 congressional districts represented by Republicans who opposed the bill are using some of its relief funds to help their police departments.

    Our ruling

    We rate Scott’s statement False.

    Opinion:no The Media Isnt Fair It Gives Republicans A Pass

    The right-wing media, willfully ignoring the press investigations into Tara Reade’s accusations, insist that former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has not been treated similarly to accused conservative men . They have a point, but not the one they were trying to make.

    arrow-right

    Let’s start with the big picture: Right-wing groups persistently engage in conduct for which Republicans are not held to account. The latter are allowed to remain silent after instances of conduct with a strong stench of white nationalism, but pay no penalty for their quietude. Right-wing demonstrators at Michigan’s statehouse this week — angrily shouting, not social distancing, misogynistic in their message, some carrying Confederate garb — were not engaged in peaceful protest. This was a mob endangering the health of police officers and others seeking to intimidate democratic government. Some protesters compared Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Adolf Hitler and displayed Nazi symbols. Newsweek reported:

    The media has adopted the approach that a pattern of sexual harassment claims over decades is not relevant because Trump has denied them, yet they want investigated the single assault claim against Biden. Biden responded in an interview and in a lengthy ; the media insists these things have to be investigated further. They do not ask Trump’s campaign why the president does not respond to questions. They do not ask Republicans about Carroll, Zervos or others.

    Social Media: Is It Really Biased Against Us Republicans

    Wednesday promises to be another stressful day for Facebook, Google and Twitter.

    Their chief executives will be grilled by senators about whether social media companies abuse their power.

    For Republicans, this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for.

    Two weeks ago, Twitter prevented people posting links to a critical New York Post investigation into Joe Biden.

    It then apologised for failing to explain its reasoning before ditching a rule it had used to justify the action.

    For many Republicans, this was the final straw – incontrovertible evidence that social media is biased against conservatives.

    The accusation is that Silicon Valley is at its core liberal and a bad arbiter of what’s acceptable on its platforms.

    In this case, Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz believed Twitter would have acted differently if the story had been about President Donald Trump.

    Sobering Report Shows Hardening Attitudes Against Media

    NEW YORK — The distrust many Americans feel toward the news media, caught up like much of the nation’s problems in the partisan divide, only seems to be getting worse.

    That was the conclusion of a “sobering” study of attitudes toward the press conducted by Knight Foundation and Gallup and released Tuesday.

    Nearly half of all Americans describe the news media as “very biased,” the survey found.

    “That’s a bad thing for democracy,” said John Sands, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation. “Our concern is that when half of Americans have some sort of doubt about the veracity of the news they consume, it’s going to be impossible for our democracy to function.”

    The study was conducted before the coronavirus lockdown and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.

    Eight percent of respondents — the preponderance of them politically conservative — think that news media that they distrust are trying to ruin the country.

    The study found that 71% of Republicans have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of the news media, while 22% of Democrats feel the same way. Switch it around, and 54% of Democrats have a very favorable view of the media, and only 13% of Republicans feel the same way.

    That divide has been documented before but only seems to be deepening, particularly among conservatives, Sands said.

    In The Age Of Trump Media Bias Comes Into The Spotlight

    Almost 20 years ago, after my first book, “,” came out, I made a lot of speeches, some of them to conservative organizations. The book was about liberal bias in the mainstream media. I had been a journalist at CBS News for 28 years and, so, it was a behind-the-scenes exposé about how the sausage was made, about how bias made its way into the news. 

    I said that despite what many conservatives think, there was no conspiracy to slant the news in a liberal direction. I said that there were no secret meetings, no secret handshakes and salutes, that anchors such as CBS’s Dan Rather never went into a room with top lieutenants, locked the door, lowered the blinds, dimmed the lights and said, “OK, how are we going to screw those Republicans today?” 

    It didn’t work that way, I said. Instead, bias was the result of groupthink. Put too many like-minded liberals in a newsroom and you’re going to get a liberal slant on the news.    

    Liberal journalists, I said, live in a comfortable liberal bubble and don’t even necessarily believe their views are liberal. Instead, they believe they are moderate, mainstream and mainly reasonable views — unlike, of course, conservative views which, to them, are none of those things.

    But what I wrote and spoke about then — mainly about how there was no conspiracy to inject bias into news stories — seems no longer to be true today. 

    Pandering, it seems, is good for business.

    Bias shows itself not only in what’s reported, but also in what’s ignored. 

    Florida Republicans Move Against Social Media Companies

    WHY ARE DEMOCRATS PROMOTING VIOLENCE AGAINST REPUBLICANS ...

    TALLAHASSEE — Concerned that social media companies were conspiring against conservatives, Florida Republicans sent a measure Thursday to Gov. Ron DeSantis that would punish online platforms that lawmakers assert discriminate against conservative thought.

    The governor had urged lawmakers to deliver the legislation to his desk as part of a broader effort to regulate Big Tech companies — in how they collect and use information they harvest from consumers and in how social media platforms treat their users.

    Republicans in Florida and elsewhere have accused the companies of censoring conservative thought on social media platforms by removing posts they consider inflammatory or using algorithms to reduce the visibility of posts that go against the grain of mainstream ideas.

    With the ubiquity of social media, the sites have become modern-day public squares — where people share in the most trivial of matters but also in ideas and information that often are unvetted.

    In recent years, social media companies have acted more aggressively in controlling the information posted on their platforms. In some cases, the companies have moved to delete posts over what they see as questionable veracity or their potential to stoke violence.

    DeSantis is a strong ally of the former president, and the Republican governor is supporting hefty financial penalties against social media platforms that suspend the accounts of political candidates.

    America Hates The Republicans And They Dont Know Why

    @jonathanchait

    Americans harbor certain deep-rooted impressions of the two parties, which have held for generations. Democrats are compassionate and generous, but spendthrift, dovish, and indulgent of crime and prone to subsidize poor people who don’t want to work. Republicans are strong on defense and crime, but too friendly to business and the rich. What is striking about the Republican government is how little effort it has made to push against, or even steer around, the unflattering elements of its brand. President Trump and his legislative partners have leaned into every ingrained prejudice the voters hold against them. They have acted as if none of their liabilities even exist.

    That is not the approach Democrats have taken in office. Bill Clinton famously fashioned himself as a “New Democrat,” angering his base on crime and welfare and declaring the era of big government over. Barack Obama did not position himself quite so overtly against his party’s brand — which had recovered in part because of Clinton’s success — but he did take care to avoid confirming political stereotypes. Obama frequently invoked the importance of parenting and personal responsibility. He did not slash the defense budget, and took pains to woo Republican support for criminal-justice reform. Obama tried repeatedly to get Republicans to compromise on a deal to reduce the budget deficit. Whatever the merits of these policies, they reflect a grasp of the party’s innate liabilities.

    Placing Some News Sources On The Political Spectrum

    Here are a few examples of major news sources and their so-called “bias” based on ratings from AllSides  and the reported level of trust from partisan audiences from the Pew Research Center survey.

    Note that much of these ratings are based on surveys of personal perceptions. Consider that these may be impacted by the hostile media effect, wherein “partisans perceive media coverage as unfairly biased against their side” . A three-decade retrospective on the hostile media effect. Mass Communication and Society18, 701-729. ).

    The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories

    It would only be logical for that memory to inform the imagination of any Republican contemplating a similar independent commission to probe what happened on Jan. 6. The commission would likely look at various right-wing groups that were involved, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, some members of which have already been charged. The commission might also delve into the social media presence and influence of various white supremacists.

    Moreover, just as the 9/11 Commission was expected to interview the current and preceding presidents, so might a new commission pursue testimony from Trump and some of his advisers, both official and otherwise, regarding their roles in the protest that wound up chasing members of Congress from both chambers into safe holding rooms underground.

    House Minority Leader McCarthy was asked last week whether he would testify if a commission were created and called on him to discuss his conversations with Trump on Jan. 6.

    “Sure,” McCarthy replied. “Next question.”

    All this may soon be moot. If Senate Democrats are unable to secure 60 votes to overcome an expected filibuster of the House-passed bill, the measure will die and the questions to be asked will fall to existing congressional committees, federal prosecutors and the media. To some degree, all can at least claim to have the same goals and intentions as an independent commission might have.

    The difference is the level of acceptance their findings are likely to have with the public.


    Popular Articles