Dec 21, 2019

Here Is Chuck Todd Skewing Viewers Perceptions With A Pro-Republican Piece Using NBC's Meet The Press

Background/Context:
1. Chuck Todd: Spreading Lies By Sanitizing Right Wing Nuts Talking Points
2. Don't Let Chuck Todd Fool Ya. The GOP Really Is Very Very Bad
3. Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing from MSNBC, When Liberal Network Couldn’t Tolerate Antiwar Voices

Chuck Todd recently won an award for Media Personality Of The Year. This doesn't make any sense unless they people who gave the prize are clueless or want to encourage media personalities to push lies to the population to deceive the people. Pretty normal in mainstream media (see list of links below, but Iraq is a great example for past and present examples of betrayals of the public's trust). Here is an example of how this con works, i.e. you skew perceptions with shows designed to support lies or to promote misinformation for your bosses, who always "happen" to be the GOP. Note: Repeating back popular talking points to liberals shouldn't be the only measure of prizes (which is the only skill Chuck Todd "has" that I can see here).

Media Matters: Meet The Press hosts all-Republican panel of voters to downplay impeachment


On December 15, NBC host Chuck Todd presented excerpts of an interview with voters in Kent County, Michigan, to discuss impeachment. The panel consisted entirely of Republican voters, most of whom voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, and most expressed either opposition or lack of interest in impeachment.
Todd introduced the voters in Kent County as “all Republican, most of whom voted for Trump in 2016.” Each voter explained why they don’t care about impeachment, arguing that “it’s just noise” and people “are just not interested” or “don’t have the time to try to follow it.” One voter compared Trump’s impeachment to that of former President Richard Nixon, arguing that Nixon’s pending impeachment was “really, really grave at the time,” but Trump’s feels like “political theater.”
Some of the voters did offer criticisms for Trump -- “he doesn’t win a lot of style points” -- but justified their decision to vote for him because of their support of Republican policies. One voter argued that “we knew who Trump was when they voted for him,” while another said that “Trump will come and go,” but “the Republican Party has the best set of answers.” A few voters did express discomfort over Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine -- one claimed he did want to know if Trump “directed a quid pro quo with Ukraine,” and another said that “it’s unlikely that [Trump’s] innocent,” but they still concluded that impeachment was relatively unimportant. Some voters also offered confused perceptions of key aspects of Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president without clarifications from the interviewer, NBC’s Dante Chinni.



The segment was part of a larger “County to County” project from Meet the Press that aims to look at five different counties in America “with the hope of better understanding the fault lines that will define the next presidential race.” In November, Meet the Press announced that the first two counties selected are Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, and Kent County, MI. Chinni wrote that Kent County is “home to the moderate, ‘chamber of commerce Republicans’ that were once the biggest base of the GOP.” He concluded that “Kent offers a good perch to watch what those more establishment Republicans will do in 2020.”
While Todd did introduce the panel of voters as all Republicans, he also presented the segment as a snapshot into how voters feel about impeachment, as opposed to a look at establishment Republicans who are unlikely to change their mind. The panel offered no opposing voice to the narrative that voters don’t care about or support impeachment, even though a new Fox News poll shows that 54% of voters support impeaching Trump, compared to 41% who oppose impeachment.The segment offers a skewed perspective of how the electorate feels about impeachment, privileging the GOP narrative that voters aren’t buying the impeachment case.
That's why the segment was a hit with pro-Trump media, who used it to portray swing states as against impeachment, even though independent journalist Marcy Wheeler found plenty of people in the exact same bar who support impeachment.

One wonders if the people in media are so stupid not to understand the effects of news or they are intentionally putting out misleading segments into the population knowing that most people won't watch the show and thus fake news is spread by 'fact based' media;

NBC’s Meet the Press spread debunked Russian disinformation on Twitter Chuck Todd mentioned the critical context during the show -- but that context didn't make its way to Twitter


NBC’s Meet the Press posted multiple tweets sharing a video clip or quote of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine “meddled in the 2016 election.” Neither the text of the tweets nor the clip explained that the claim was reportedly part of a Russian disinformation effort.
The New York Times first reported on November 22 that U.S. intelligence services had told the Senate that claims of Ukrainian meddling in the election resulted from a yearslong effort by Russian intelligence operatives “to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election.” Former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill also explained in her testimony to the House impeachment inquiry that “this is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
Meet the Press' Twitter account posted six tweets related to the interview with Cruz, four of which featured a two-minute video of Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd asking, “Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?” then reacting incredulously and criticizing the claim when Cruz said yes. Two other tweets included Cruz’s affirmative answer without the video.

...

In the full segment, Todd did explain why this is a false and debunked claim, but none of these tweets included those crucial details. Soledad O’Brien, an experienced broadcast journalist who hosts the weekly show Matter of Fact, explained how Meet the Press should have framed the clip instead:


Later in the segment, Todd mentioned the intelligence community briefing to the Senate that showed Cruz’s narrative originated from a Russian intelligence effort, but the clip posted on Twitter cuts off before he mentions it -- leaving the hundreds of thousands who viewed the shorter clip on Twitter without the context necessary to understand that Cruz was spouting a debunked conspiracy theory.
Major media outlets have had an ongoing problem of repeating misinformation on Twitter without debunking it. And NBC’s Meet the Press is not the first major outlet guilty of spreading this specific falsehood -- The Hill did the same exact thing with an interview of another Republican senator in late November.

Read full piece.
My guess is that media promotes misinformation on twitter to engage people on social media. They also don't like to fight Fox News which has maintained a number 1 ranking for decades. Instead Fox News is allowed to lie daily with little to no push back from "fact based" media. Until Trump. Thank God for him.


Media


No comments:

Post a Comment