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jsterner21ahsgov · 5 years ago

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Media Assessment of Issue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/08/understanding-racism-inequality-america/?arc404=true

SUBJECT- This article is showing the injustices dealt to many throughout our history and how we are still fighting to end these in our country.

AUTHOR- This particular document is done by the Washington post staff there credentials are that they work for Washington post but this is a more left leaning so that could have influenced the document.

CONTEXT- This article was released on August 18, 2020 and was made in Washington this effected the side they were on about racial injustice because a lot of people were still protesting and supporting the black lives matter movement.

AUDIENCE- The Washington post staff created this document and was published by them as well I think this document was targeting people of younger age because of the easygoing writing style that is very fluent and easy to understand but gets message they are conveying to the reader.

PERSPECTIVE- The perspective they use during this is more objective because they don’t really take a side they state facts and stay pretty neutral but they tend to mention the left sided arguments more than the right.

SIGNIFICANCE- They use real life situations that happened in the world during the times of the protest and the times of quarantine for example the corona virus and people taking down confederate statues.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/515811-poll-most-americans-support-athletes-kneeling-in-protest-say

SUBJECT- In this article it is trying to show that big named people in sports are trying to spread awareness of the recent protests and what they believe in and they are saying that most of them are doing this.

AUTHOR- Justin Wise is the author of this article, Justin Wise is a staff writer for the hill he dosent say what his political affiliation is but judging from his articles he look to be more left leaning.

CONTEXT- this article was produced 09/10/20 this affects the article greatly because of how thing are in the world right now like the corona virus sports being able to be played and the blm moment and protests.

AUDIENCE- This article was targeting the sports fans obviously with the main thumbnail of the players kneeling and there are sports fans of every age and gender so these were the people targeted.

PERSPECTIVE- this article is subjective it is saying that most Americans are supporting or that 8 out of 10 black Americans support it this is subjective because they are only using there survey sample and not everyone was surveyed.

SIGNIFICANCE- The surveys that were used in this article and the percentages they were talking about.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/racial-injustice-protests-across-country-lead-clashes-police-arrests-n1234936

SUBJECT- This article is conveying that people are protesting and have kept doing it therefore it is leading the the arrests of citizens even though the arrests are causing havoc.

AUTHOR- this was made by Dennis Romero and Andrew Blankstein both of these people are NBC news journalist and tend to stay neutral during there articles.

CONTEXT- This was made July 25 2020 this effects the article because this was in the heat of the protests and people tend to take a side when a major event is going on.

AUDIENCE- This was targeting older adults and protesters that live near where the issue was taking place or people that just wanted to learn about it and be informed on what is going on during these protests.

PERSPECTIVE- this artical is neutral therefor it is objective this tells both sides of the story and why things are happening like the arrests and what people are doing to deserve such things.

SIGNIFICANCE- They used police statements and real world things for example the death of Brianna Taylor for there evidence in this article.

The are all talking about why things are happening and the things people are doing to spread awareness some articles talk about the cause and effect while others talk about what you need to do to help society take on this racial injustice.

The first article is the one I relate with the most this talks about how racial injustice had shaped our history why things are happening as they are right now and why things have led up to the protests and need for new things regarding BLM.

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Ranking The Jeopardy! Guest Hosts So Far

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When Jeopardy! GOAT contestant Brad Rutter spoke to Den of Geek earlier this year, he shared his opinion that there is only one perfect Jeopardy! host to replace the departed Alex Trebek.

“Alex,” Rutter said. “But we can’t do it, unfortunately. That’s one of the terrible things about it. I can’t even really imagine what it’s going to be like.”

Alex Trebek was about as irreplaceable as a TV personality can be. As the host and quiz master of Jeopardy! for 37 years, the Canadian entertainer was the perfect combination of studious, professional, and playful. Following Trebek’s death from pancreatic cancer in November 2020, Jeopardy!’s producers realized there was no point in replacing the TV giant with only one host.

For all of 2021, Jeopardy! has been going with a host-by-committee approach, giving several pop culture figures the opportunity to try their hand at shepherding the game show in two-week increments. This parade of guest hosts is in part a way to honor Trebek’s legacy. It’s also an open audition to provide fresh blood with an opportunity to claim the job of a television mainstay.

With that in mind, here are our rankings of how each guest host has performed thus far.

11. Dr. Mehmet Oz

Show Air Dates: March 22, 2021 – April 2, 2021

No.

10. Savannah Guthrie

Show Air Dates: June 14, 2021 – June 25, 2021

Savannah Guthrie is an amiable and professional TV presence in her day job as the co-anchor of NBC’s Today. In her time as a Jeopardy! host, however, she came off as essentially filler. As is the case with most of the entrants on this list (save for the quack above), Guthrie was perfectly fine as Jeopardy! host. But while she got the job done, she did so without any particular distinction.

Guthrie also interjected a bit too frequently after contestant’s answers. Though that’s an admirable attempt to interject some of her sunny personality into the proceedings, the role of Jeopardy! host often calls for less rather than more. As such her two-week run as host is likely to be the end of the line for her hosting quest.

9. Anderson Cooper

Show Air Dates: April 19, 2021 – April 30, 2021

Anderson Cooper is a good journalist and compelling TV presence. When it comes to Jeopardy!, however, he’s definitely not the right man for the job. Cooper is somewhat fortunate that human trainwreck Dr. Oz hosted first and gobbled up the lion’s share of bad Jeopardy! host press. Otherwise people may have noticed that Cooper did fairly poorly in his two-week stint.

Cooper seemingly didn’t prepare as intensely as Trebek or the other guest hosts as there would frequently be awkward pauses following contestants’ answers while the host checked if they were right. As a result, the number of Jeopardy! rounds not completed under Cooper’s tenure was unusually high. It’s a small issue, but an impactful one.

8. Katie Couric

Show Air Dates: March 8, 2021- March 19, 2021

Couric’s tenure as Jeopardy! host was the victim of bad timing. She had the tough act of following two guest hosts who were extremely steeped in the show’s history in culture in official Greatest of All Time Ken Jennings and executive producer Mike Richards.

The longtime media personality ultimately did a fair job as host, with her only major flaw being interjecting a bit too frequently during rounds. Unfortunately, she doesn’t stack up well to the pros that preceded her.

7. Aaron Rodgers

Show Air Dates: April 5, 2021 – April 16, 2021

While the presence of a NFL star may seem like a desperate ratings grab from Jeopardy!, Green Bay Packers quarterback and former Celebrity Jeopardy! champ Aaron Rodgers is apparently dead serious about wanting the full-time hosting job, telling The Ringer that he could easily fit the show’s shooting schedule into his NFL obligations.

Rodgers’ eagerness was evident over the first week and led to him coming across as a bit too excitable. He really settled into the role in his second week though and projected the correct balance of expertise and personability.

6. Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Show Air Dates: June 28, 2021 – July 9, 2021

Perhaps this is a simple observation, but it’s really something to see how natural and poised TV veterans are on television. As CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta has plenty of experience in front of a camera. And that experience absolutely came through in his two-week stint as Jeopardy! host.

Gupta did little to distinguish himself from the favorites to take over hosting job later on this list, but there were absolutely no hiccups during his tenure – just two weeks of excellent Jeopardy! that also happened to feature the season’s most fearsome contestant yet in seven-time winner Courtney Shah.

5. Bill Whitaker

Show Air Dates: May 3, 2021 – May 14, 2021

In contrast to Aaron Rodgers, Bill Whitaker apparently has no interest in holding down the full-time Jeopardy! job, telling The Philadelphia Tribune that he enjoys his current gig as a CBS journalist. That’s a shame as Whitaker came off as quite a natural during his two-week stint.

Soft-spoken and consistent, Whitaker was such a steadying presence in his time as host to the point that the novelty of there even being a guest host began to wear off. Ultimately he might be a little too one-note for a full-time Jeopardy! host but his time on the dais was well spent.

4. Ken Jennings

Show Air Dates: January 4, 2021 – February 19, 2021

In the Jeopardy! canon Ken Jennings is the only figure that approaches the quiz show sainthood of Alex Trebek himself. Jennings is the most impressive and successful Jeopardy! contestant of all time, winning 74 consecutive games, amassing over $4 million in earnings, and taking home the title of Jeopardy! GOAT in 2020. When he was brought aboard as a consulting producer on Jeopardy! last year, many naturally assumed he was being groomed for the hosting role.

Sure enough, Jennings was announced as the first guest host of 2021 and got the year started on the right track with over a month of excellent hosting. Jennings has said that part of the key to Trebek’s success with Jeopardy! was his intuitive understanding that the star of the show wasn’t any host or contestant, but rather the show itself. Jennings put that understanding to good use, using his wealth of experience to make the game show feel both friendly and satisfyingly competitive.

Jennings would be a fine choice for Jeopardy! host. Perhaps his only real weakness, however, is…the tweeting, as it always seems to be. Jennings has tweeted jokes that toe the line between bad taste and offensive in the past, something that he apologized for last year. The issue with Jennings on Twitter though isn’t the risk of future offensive tweets but rather his continued use of Twitter at all along with the rest of us plebs.

Jeopardy! seemingly exists outside of time itself. Save for improved graphics and Trebek’s graying hair, the show has remained largely the same since it premiered. The Platonic ideal of a Jeopardy! host would seem like he or she was spawned from the set itself, returning backstage to sit on their trivia throne and contemplate the mysteries of life between tapings.

3. Mayim Bialik

Show Air Dates: May 31, 2021 – June 11, 2021

Mayim Bialik was a real pleasant surprise in her stint as host. In fact, she’s the best Jeopardy! guest host yet who was not previously affiliated with the show. Bialik leaned more toward the friendly end of the familiar/authoritative Jeopardy! hosting ratio, which is particularly impressive given her academic background as a literal neuroscientist. She kept up that energy throughout but was able to establish a nice balance in her second week.

As a longtime Big Bang Theory cast member, Bialik certainly doesn’t need the Jeopardy! hosting gig to pay the bills. But her experience in front of a live-studio audience and a clear passion for learning could prove useful in the position.

2. Buzzy Cohen

Show Air Dates: May 17, 2021 – May 28, 2021

On the flip side of Bill Whitaker, Buzzy Cohen may at first seem like too dynamic of a personality to work as a Jeopardy! guest host. His fun nickname, distinctive eyewear, and trendy haircut are at odds with such an ancient and venerated TV institution.

As host of Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions, however, Cohen was consistently great. Due to his time as a Jeopardy! champion himself, Cohen empathizes with contestants easily and keeps things going at a rapidly appropriate pace for the competitive tournament known as “The Nerd Super Bowl.”

Could Cohen still succeed in shepherding the game show when played by its more “normal” contestants? He certainly deserves some consideration to do so.

1. Mike Richards

Show Air Dates: February 22, 2021- March 5, 2021

Alex Trebek would occasionally be asked in interviews who he’d like to replace him. It was not a question he frequently answered because who would want to speculate about an event that would presumably only occur after their death. He often joked that Betty White should because she was a close friend. But in the few instances he did consider the question seriously, he offered up Los Angeles Kings play-by-play announcer Alex Faust, Turner Classic Movies host Ben Makiewicz, and CNN legal analyst Laura Coates. Ultimately, however, he told journalists at the Television Critics Association press tour that he “would leave it up to the people in charge.”

Well, what if one of those mythical people in charge was the right choice to host all along? Mike Richards is an executive producer for Jeopardy! and its Merv Griffin-created syndicated companion Wheel of Fortune. Richards has a long history of producing other game shows like Weakest Link, The Price is Right, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He’s even hosted a couple of game shows of his own such as Beauty and the Geek and The Pyramid. After Ken Jennings served his month-long stint as host, Richards stepped in for two weeks, seemingly only to buy the show some time before it could set up more guest hosts.

Richard’s two-week tenure as guest host, however, was absolutely superb. Despite the stuffy connotation associated with the job “executive producer”, Richards was the most outwardly bubbly and joyful guest host yet. He still projected an air of authority and trivia mastery, likely due to his comfort and experience with the format. Richards was also an attentive interviewer, and well-researched – his shows were among the smoothest this season thus far.

Richards lacks important name recognition (in fact, his name is about as generic as they come) and would not win Jeopardy! any more viewers on star power alone. It also must be said that Jeopardy! could stand to diversify the syndicated TV game a bit with this hosting decision by choosing a woman or person of color.

Whether Richards is selected as the full time host remains to be seen. But as executive producer, he’ll be involved in the decision one way or another. And if his talent scouting is anywhere near as good as his hosting ability, then there is nothing to worry about.

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Still to come: George Stephanopoulos (Show Air Dates: July 12, 2021 – July 16, 2021), Robin Roberts (Show Air Dates: July 19, 2021 – July 23, 2021), LeVar Burton (Show Air Dates: July 26, 2021 – July 30, 2021), David Faber (Show Air Dates: August 2, 2021 – August 6, 2021), Joe Buck (Show Air Dates: August 9, 2021 – August 13, 2021)

The post Ranking The Jeopardy! Guest Hosts So Far appeared first on Den of Geek.

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howtotitleanessay427 · 5 years ago

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same day essays

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Photo Essay The story of Q is premised on the need for Q to stay nameless. It’s why Q originally picked 4chan, one of the last places built for anonymity on the social net. “I’ve often associated Q to earlier figures like John Titor or Satoshi Nakamoto,” Brennan informed me, referring to 2 legends of web anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name utilized by the unknown creator of bitcoin. One of his favorite rallying cries is “Enjoy the show”—a reference to a coming apocalypse.What might have languished as a lonely screed on a single picture board as an alternative incited fervor. Its profile was enhanced, according to Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins of NBC News, by several conspiracy theorists whose promotion of Q in flip helped build up their very own online profiles. By now, nearly three years since Q’s original messages appeared, there have been 1000's of what his followers call “Q drops”—messages posted to picture boards by Q. He uses a password-protected “tripcode,” a collection of letters and numbers visible to other image-board customers to signal the continuity of his identity over time. If the web is one big rabbit hole containing infinitely recursive rabbit holes, QAnon has by some means found its method down all of them, gulping up lesser conspiracy theories as it goes. Not so way back, he used to observe CNN, and couldn’t get sufficient of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we all the time have been,” he stated. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s occurring. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to occur.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They couldn't provide specifics and as a substitute inspired me to do the research myself. The third group of theories holds that Q is a collective, with a small variety of individuals sharing access to the account. This third class includes the notion that Q is a new type of open-source army-intelligence company. John Titor is the name used on several message boards in 2000 and 2001 by somebody claiming to be a army time traveler from the year 2036. He had migrated from 4chan (fearing that the location had been “infiltrated”) to the picture board 8chan, after which 8chan went dark. The episode had eerie similarities to two different shootings. Four months earlier, in April 2019, the suspected shooter in a murderous rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, had posted an anti-Semitic letter on 8chan. Weeks earlier than that, the man who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques had posted a white-supremacist manifesto on 8chan. When I asked them how they defined the events Q had predicted that never occurred, similar to Clinton’s arrest, they mentioned that deception is a part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I assume there were more things that were predicted that did occur.” Her tone was light rather than indignant. The QAnon universe is sprawling and deep, with layer upon layer of context, acronyms, characters, and shorthand to be taught. CBTS stands for “calm before the storm,” and WWG1WGA stands for “Where we go one, we go all,” which has turn out to be an expression of solidarity among Q followers. The destruction of the worldwide cabal is imminent, Q prophesies. His “Q for Beginners” video consists of advertisements from corporations similar to the vacation-rental website Vrbo and from The Epoch Times, a global pro-Trump newspaper. Q evangelists have taken a “publish all over the place” strategy that is half outreach, half redundancy. If one platform cracks down on QAnon, as Reddit did, they won’t have to begin from scratch somewhere else. Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails in opposition to respectable sources of data as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook quite than information retailers run by journalists. An AR-15 rifle makes for a conspicuous sash in most social settings, but particularly at a spot like Comet. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You might be a mom, selecting leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones throughout the road. The most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the most important social-media platforms and image boards. Vloggers and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where folks can pay them in month-to-month sums. There’s additionally money to be produced from adverts on YouTube. That appears to be the primary focus for Hayes, whose movies have been viewed more than 33 million instances altogether. They don’t learn the native paper or watch any of the major tv networks. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. You might be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You might nicely have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you might be exhausting to determine just from the way you look—which is nice, as a result of someday soon darkish forces may attempt to track you down. You perceive this sounds loopy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, working in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings.

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thewebofslime · 6 years ago

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Executives at the news company Axios were outwardly unperturbed when Jonathan Swan, one of the Politico-for-kids site’s star reporters, attracted widespread condemnation last November for gloating about getting President Donald Trump to consider ending birthright citizenship. “Our profile is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we’re going to have more cool successes,” Axios editor-in-chief Nicholas Johnston told staff later. Executive editor Mike Allen acknowledged that Axios had, perhaps, erred ever so slightly, but seemed otherwise unconcerned with the criticism. “You can’t buy the amount of public exposure we got this past week for our journalism,” he wrote. That may be true. What you can buy, however, are the services of a verbose, relentless Wikipedia editor willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that that public exposure is as flattering as possible. So, Axios did. Axios may not have expressed its worries about its reputational problem publicly or even to its own staff, but the company did hire Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who’s now a paid Wikipedia editor at WhiteHatWiki.com, to do damage control. Axios had previously hired Sussman to beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign — if largely flattering — stats about Axios’ accomplishments) in February 2018. A week after Swan’s Trump interview aired, Sussman was hard at work on the reporter’s Wikipedia page, arguing that the entry was unfair to Swan and used “sensationalistic language” instead of the “dispassionate voice” Wikipedia requires. To correct the issue, he suggested a total overhaul of the description. About a month later, Sussman proposed a list of extensive edits to Swan’s page. Some were clearly in service of his original argument about the Trump interview; others, such as his suggestion that Wikipedia editors add an “Awards and Honors” section, seemed focused on promoting Swan himself. He also asked editors to remove a sentence noting that Swan had once incorrectly reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned. Sussman then suggested the following paragraph be placed in its stead: On September 24, 2018, he was the first to report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned and published the Rosenstein exit statement that the Justice Department sent to the White House. The story was later updated to clarify that is was uncertain if the White House had accepted the resignation, which it ultimately did not. Swan later said he had given the resignation story unwarranted certainty. Most of Sussman’s changes were approved. The vast majority of the people who propose and make changes to Wikipedia are volunteers. A few people, however, have figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia’s supposedly neutral system to turn a profit. That’s Sussman’s business. And in just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook’s PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. Wikipedia Editing For Fun And Profit! Wikipedia’s rules can feel dense and impenetrable and are phenomenally boring to talk about, but it helps to know a little about the site’s structure to understand exactly what Sussman does. So bear with me. One of Wikipedia’s more well-known rules is its prohibition on editing pages that you have any sort of direct connection to. This, along with the fact that it’s humiliating to get caught editing your own Wikipedia page, is usually enough of a deterrent to companies and public figures looking to inject a positive spin. But those looking to get around the site’s conflict of interest rules aren’t totally without options. Anyone, even someone financially tied to the subject in question, is allowed to merely suggest edits in the hopes that a less conflicted editor might come by, agree, and implement the changes for them. This is where a paid editor like Sussman comes in. On his website, Sussman identifies himself as “a journalist, lawyer, academic and technology entrepreneur” who “is often called upon in ‘crisis management’ situations where inaccurate or misleading information has been placed in a Wikipedia article, potentially creating severe business problems for its subject.” And because Sussman is open about what he’s doing, he’s forced to play by Wikipedia’s rules, which means disclosing his affiliation every time he suggests an edit on behalf of a client. One risk, he warns clients, is that “an experienced Wikipedia user might check the Talk page of the article” (the section attached to every article where editors discuss issues or concerns that come up) and discover that an editor with a conflict of interest had made his mark. In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook’s PR firm have all paid Sussman to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. In a phone call with HuffPost, Sussman repeatedly emphasized that: 1) There was no story here; 2) Everything he does is aboveboard; 3) The real problem is the paid editing that goes undisclosed. “I am not the one sucking in the business,” he said. “The ones sucking in all the business are the firms who, when they get a call, say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll take care of it.’ And they just take it down and they don’t do a disclosure.” Edits made by someone with an undisclosed conflict of interest are certainly rampant, but once discovered, those illicit edits are reversed. Sussman’s suggestions, because they’re allowed within Wikipedia’s guidelines, can have much more lasting influence. Although he’s only technically allowed to suggest changes on a subject’s Talk page, Sussman has an impressive track record of getting edits approved on behalf of his clients. The Players Although Sussman declined to provide a complete list of clients, the fact that he’s required to disclose who signs his paychecks means all that information is out there somewhere — and just takes a little digging to find. In addition to Axios, HuffPost found Sussman making edits on behalf of Facebook, NBC and casual racism depository Nextdoor. NBC confirmed its relationship with Sussman in an email to HuffPost. A spokesperson for Axios also confirmed its relationship with Sussman, adding, “Axios hired him to correct factual inaccuracies. Pretty sure lots of people do this.” Facebook and Nextdoor have not yet responded to requests for comment. Facebook’s PR agency paid Sussman to tweak Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s page. Those successful (if mild) changes weren’t the totality of his Facebook work, though. He also spent over a year lobbying Wikipedia’s editors to create a page for Facebook’s global head of PR, Caryn Marooney, despite being repeatedly turned down over her lack of notability. But Sussman, to many editors’ dismay, is indefatigable, and he eventually triumphed. NBC, too, apparently decided to put Sussman’s service to use in the aftermath of The New Yorker’s bombshell Harvey Weinstein report and, later, the allegations of sexual misconduct against Matt Lauer. Several NBC employees, including Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and NBC Chairman Andy Lack, benefited from Sussman’s intervention, too. In one proposed edit, Sussman attempted to argue that on NBC News’ Wikipedia page, the mention of criticism directed at NBC over its handling of Matt Lauer constituted a violation of Wikipedia’s rules, since “it does not summarize the opposing point of view.” Here’s the paragraph Sussman took issue with: Ronan Farrow’s story about the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations was developed at NBC News in 2017; the company chose not to publish it and Farrow took the story to the The New Yorker which published it after the New York Times broke the story. The NBC News organization was criticized for not publishing the Weinstein story and were further criticized when news broke of the sexual harassment claims against Matt Lauer. And here’s just some of what Sussman proposed instead: Today Show host Matt Lauer was fired in November 2017, about 36 hours after a formal sexual misconduct complaint was lodged against him. Some said the issue was well-handled because Lauer was fired swiftly and management began an organization-wide discussion of sexual harassment, but others were critical of NBC for not knowing about Lauer’s alleged behavior. In other words, the criticism Sussman includes in his “more balanced approach” is, essentially, that people were mad over the fact that NBC is not omniscient. (That is not what they were mad about.) Just the other week, Sussman proposed that editors remove a portion of Chuck Todd’s page that mentioned a potentially embarrassing 2016 Daily Caller report about an invitation found in the leaked emails of former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. According to the invite, Todd and his wife had hosted a dinner for Hillary Clinton’s then-communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and her husband. Sussman asked that editors remove any mention of the report from Todd’s page because Wikipedia had previously (and correctly) determined the Daily Caller to be an unreliable source and, according to Sussman, “it is not sourced elsewhere.” This, however, is untrue. The invitation was reported in both the Observer and The Florida Times-Union, in addition to the invitation’s appearance on WikiLeaks itself. But because Sussman’s stated complaints all aligned with Wikipedia’s guidelines, the section was removed. How To Win Arguments And Exhaust People Sussman’s main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn’t work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there’s little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman’s arguments. So he usually gets his way. In January of last year, for instance, you would have found this section on the page for NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Sussman took exception to the section, explaining why in a punchy 700-word screed, which masochists can read here. Assuming you are unable to make it through that, though, Sussman’s argument is, essentially, that this allegation doesn’t deserve its own section, that the citation on the first sentence doesn’t support the sentence’s claim, and that the last sentence is unsourced. That first citation linked to Ronan Farrow’s October 2017 New Yorker story detailing the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which does indeed fail to mention Oppenheim or NBC. However, HuffPost reported later that month that Oppenheim had made the decision to kill Farrow’s story at NBC ― a fact Sussman conveniently omitted while picking and choosing from Wikipedia’s catalog of rules to build his case. After a bit of a back-and-forth between Sussman and an editor who goes by Jytdog, Jytdog appeared to become fed up with Sussman’s needling, writing that “the current content is fine. NBC news owns plenty of platforms to broadcast its PR about not getting this story. The article communicates that they had it and did not publish it.” The discussion of Sussman’s suggestions quickly becomes hard to follow —Oppenheim’s Talk page is currently about 12,000 words long. The actual entry is less than one-tenth of that. Ultimately, though, a comment period was opened to discuss the section, and despite Jytdog’s urgings, a majority of editors decided to leave the information off Oppenheim’s page. A bit of digging into the editors that voted to oppose the section, however, reveals a peculiar little pattern. Like Wikipedia’s subject pages, each editor also has his or her own general page, in addition to a corresponding Talk page. Looking through the Talk page histories of the editors who sided with Sussman reveals that Sussman directly petitioned a number of them to weigh in. When viewed in Wikipedia’s user logs, it looks like this: Again, because Sussman has a conflict of interest as a paid consultant, Wikipedia’s rules forbid him from making edits to one of his client’s Wikipedia pages directly. The only way Sussman can make good on his promise to his clients, then, is by enlisting sympathetic editors. Editors who side with him are usually burdened with more requests down the line. Although Wikipedia doesn’t technically forbid reaching out to others to ask for their insight, it does forbid petitioning editors to weigh in “with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.” Editors will periodically catch on to Sussman’s activities and admonish him on his Talk page. Posts calling attention to Sussman’s lobbying of other editors rarely stay up for more than a week. According to his Talk page history, Sussman deletes criticism frequently and any record of it in his user logs often gets buried by his prolific posting and editing. Usually, though, these warnings against Sussman’s petitioning are ignored. Last May, for instance, Sussman proposed that a section on the page for Nextdoor “about a misdemeanor traffic offense by Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia should be removed” for irrelevance. The CEO’s “misdemeanor traffic offense” was originally charged as a felony hit-and-run after he allegedly swerved unexpectedly into another lane of traffic, caused a crash, and bolted. The charges were only reduced after Tolia claimed not to know that he was supposed to stay at the scene of the crash. Sussman solicited input from a number of editors, and the section was ultimately removed. On Sussman’s website’s FAQ page, he notes that even when he requests changes, “the article looks exactly the same” to an outsider. His success rate, he brags, is 100 percent.

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 7 years ago

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5 People Dead, 2 Injured In ‘Targeted’ Capital Gazette Shooting

* A gunman opened fire in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland. * An official said there were five fatalities and two other people were injured. * A lily-white male in his late 30 s, to be defined by media reports as Jarrod Ramos, has been taken into custody. * The suppose apparently mutilated his fingers to shun determining, but authorities have identified him expending facial acceptance technology. SAUL LOEB via Getty Images Police respond to a shooting at the position building that houses the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, on Thursday. Five parties vanished and two were injured in a “targeted attack” on the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, on Thursday, according to city officials. The suspect has been identified in various media reports as Jarrod Ramos, 38, nearby residents of Laurel, Maryland. Court enters show that Ramos has been charged with five countings of first-degree slaying, and will have a bail hearing Friday morning. The Capital Gazette corroborated on Twitter that Ramos had filed a defamation litigation against the working paper and a critic in 2012. Bill Krampf, deputy chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, decreased to figure the suppose during a news briefing on Thursday but said he was a lily-white male in his late 30 s. Krampf said the man consumed a shotgun and “looked for his preys as he stepped through” the newsroom. Authorities linked the main victims as Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Robert Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara , noting that all labor in some capacity for the Capital Gazette. Krampf have also pointed out that the news channel had received social media threats that indicated brutality “as early as today, ” although investigators were still specifying who cast them. “This person was prepared today to come in, this person was prepared to shoot parties, ” Krampf pronounced. “His intent was to cause harm, and as I territory before, the investigate part of this is going to be careful and it’s going to take some time.” He sustained: “The Capital newspaper is our local newspaper. We interact with the Capital newspaper daily. We have friends at the Capital newspaper, “were talking about” these men and women on a daily basis. We’re now. We’re gave. We’re going to come this inquiry right.” This person was prepared today to come in, this person was prepared to shoot beings. His intent was to cause harm. Bill Krampf, deputy chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department Authorities remarked officers were at the panorama within approximately a minute of receiving 911 calls and that they evacuated 170 parties from the building. They abruptly made the accused into custody, although Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh said the man “has not been very forthcoming” about his rationale, according to The Associated Press. The suspect apparently mutilated his thumbs in some way to avoid being identified, an unnamed law enforcement official told the AP and CBS. Powers afterward told NBC that the believe was identified exploiting facial approval engineering and that a search warrant had been issued for his house. Krampf was unable to confirm those accounts. Krampf noted earlier Thursday that officials had discovered what they “thought may have been an explosive invention that has been taken care of” at the site of the crime. He eventually was indicated that they’d noted a pocket containing inhaled grenades. Lisa Clough, chairman of media ties-in for the University of Maryland Medical Center, confirmed to HuffPost that one patient from the killing was at their facility but had not been able confirm the type of wind or case of individual patients. Power described the injuries as superficial curves , not gunshots, and said they may have been caused by shattered glass in the newsroom. During the shooting, reporters treated developments in the situation as it occurred. “A single shooter fire various parties at my power, some of whom are dead, ” tweeted Phil Davis, a reporter at the paper. “There is nothing more terrifying than examining various people get shot while you’re under your table and then discover the gunman reload.” Davis described the crap-shooter as shooting through the building’s glass door. Photojournalist Joshua McKerrow, who determines himself as working for The Baltimore Sun and Capital Gazette, tweeted photos from the place that testified a ponderous law enforcement existence outside. A Twitter user who links himself as an intern at the Capital Gazette tweeted out a request for help around 2:45 p.m. local time. Baltimore Police participated at the newsroom of The Baltimore Sun — which owns the series of affiliated society newspapers in the Capital Gazette newsroom — as a prudence, but have not reported obtaining anything. The New York City Police Department likewise cast police to major New York media shops, including HuffPost, following the attack. “These deployments are not based on specific threat information, but preferably out of an abundance of carefulnes until we learn more about the suppose and purposes behind the Maryland shooting, ” Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said in a statement. “It has become a standard practice to shift aids strategically during active shooter or terrorist events.” Google Maps The be built upon Bestgate Road where jurisdictions responded to a shooting Thursday. Jimmy DeButts, community news editor and metro critic for the Capital Gazette, tweeted about the shooting Thursday afternoon, saying he was “numb.” “We deter doing more with less. We find ways to cover high school sports, smashing word, excise hikes, academy budgets& regional recreation, ” he tweeted. “We are there in times of tragedy. We do our best to share the stories of parties, those who become our community better. Please understand, we do all this to serve our community.” “We try to expose bribery, ” he continued. “We crusaded to get access to public records& bring to light the inner workings of authority despite major overcomes put in our highway. The reporters& writers give their all into finding the truth. That is our goal. Will always be.” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, responding to word of the hitting on Twitter, said he is “absolutely devastated to learn of this tragedy.” “The Capital Gazette is my hometown article, and I have the greatest respect for the fine correspondents, and all the men and women, who work there, ” Hogan said in a statement. “They help every day to glint light on the world around us so that we might recognize with more clarity and greater understanding.” He prolonged: “There is no lieu in our society for this kind of hatred and violence, and the individual responsible for this grisly misdemeanour must be prosecuted to the fullest degree of the law.” President Donald Trump tweeted he has been briefed on the shooting and his “thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.” “Thank you to all of the First Responders which is now on the background, ” he tweeted. Maryland has some of the nation’s most stringent shoot regulations. A 2013 rule generally forbids sales of so-called assault weapons like the AR-1 5, the semi-automatic rifle used in countless recent mass shootings. The territory too curbs the sale of rifles or shotguns for customers with a autobiography of mental illness, brutal action, criminal convictions or drug addictions. In April, Hogan banned bump assets and expanded law enforcement’s they are able to expropriate grease-guns from distressed someones with additional measures known as a “red flag” principle. He likewise approved$ 5 million in funding for grease-gun violence prevention programs. See more photos of the incident below TAGEND SAUL LOEB via Getty Images Police respond to a shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, at a house that contains the Capital Gazette newsroom. SAUL LOEB via Getty Images Police respond to a shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, at a building that contains the Capital Gazette newsroom. Reuters Police detectives respond to an active crap-shooter inside a house that houses the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland. Reuters Police officers respond to an active shooter inside a build that houses the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland. Reuters Journalist E.B Furgurson, right, makes notations with two other beings as police officers answer. Reuters Journalist E.B Furgurson, right, takes mentions with two other people as police officers answer. Reuters Police policemen talk to a serviceman outside the representation. Reuters Police officers talk to a male outside the stage. SAUL LOEB via Getty Images Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan( R) speaks during a press conference. SAUL LOEB via Getty Images Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan( R) words during a news conference. Baltimore Sun via Getty Images Police respond to the situation. Baltimore Sun via Getty Images Police respond to the scene. Joshua Roberts/ Reuters Police gather near the Capital Gazette newspaper agency. Joshua Roberts/ Reuters Police gather near the Capital Gazette newspaper office. Baltimore Sun via Getty Images Baltimore Sun via Getty Images Alex Wroblewski via Getty Images Emergency personnel congregate outside. Alex Wroblewski via Getty Images Emergency personnels assemble outside. Joshua Roberts/ Reuters Joshua Roberts/ Reuters Hayley Miller, Jenna Amatulli, Michelle Lou, Lydia O’Connor, Sara Boboltz and Liza Hearon lent reporting. This is a developing story. Check back for informs. RELATED COVERAGE Capital Gazette Journalist Reports Live During Active Shooting Sean Hannity Blames Maxine Waters For Capital Gazette Shooting These Are The Victims Of The Capital Gazette Shooting Download http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/06/5-people-dead-2-injured-in-targeted-capital-gazette-shooting/

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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David Ushery

David Ushery (born June 5, 1967) is a veteran American television news anchor at WNBC News 4 New York, NBC’s flagship owned and operated station. Ushery co-anchors the 5:30 pm newscast alongside Shiba Russell and the noon newscast on Thursdays & Friday's alongside Shiba Russell as well.

Ushery is also the creator and anchor of “The Debrief with David Ushery,” which airs on WNBC and the station’s New York Nonstop cable channel, as well as co-host of “Moms and the City and a Dad named David,” airing on New York, NBC's Cozi TV.

Considered “a standout at the company—and in this market," as well as an anchor willing to venture into uncharted territory and create innovative programming, the award-winning Ushery has been a trusted and respected journalist in New York City since 1993. He has also been lauded for his volunteer work and commitment to community.

Early life

Ushery was born and raised in Bloomfield, Connecticut, the only child of Solomon Ushery and Winifred Ushery. The journalism bug bit early.

At age 11, Ushery was selected from a statewide search to host the local edition of “Kidsworld,” a nationally syndicated television show. One of his early interviews was with the late Walter Cronkite, the former CBS News anchor once ranked as the most trusted man in America. In what could be considered a prescient scene from that interview, young Ushery sits at the anchor desk. He asked Cronkite, “What kind of person should be a newscaster?” Cronkite responded that a person should have a sense of curiosity. Ushery has said of the interview: “Many have asked if I think that's when the seed was planted for me to become a television reporter and anchor. I say, YES.” Connecticut audiences would see Ushery grow up on television. He hosted “Kidsworld” until he was 18.

Ushery graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double-major in Political Science and Journalism. While at the university he was a staff writer for the Hartford Courant newspaper, where he honed his skills for covering local politics and events. He also reported for the Los Angeles Times. The CBS affiliate in Hartford, WFSB-TV, hired Ushery right after his graduation for its training program. But recognizing his talent, the station offered him a full-time general assignment reporting position within just a matter of months.

Career

As the lead reporter for WFSB’s 11pm broadcast, Ushery covered many stories impacting the everyday lives of the citizens of Connecticut’s capital city. But one of these stories made an indelible impression on Ushery: the night he and his photographer spent with residents of New Britain who were being terrorized by arsonists. Within two years of starting at the station, Ushery traveled to Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union for a story on policing. The overseas trip would become the first of many in Ushery’s career, as news directors recognized his talent for covering international stories.

In 1993, at the age of 25, Ushery was recruited by WABC-TV in New York City to join its staff as a general assignment reporter, covering news for the number one station in the top market in the nation. Since then, Ushery has been a familiar face to New York City viewers reporting on the city’s tragedies and triumphs.

He was part of the station’s coverage of the police investigations into the shooting death of Amadou Diallo and the torture of Abner Louima, the deaths of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and John F. Kennedy, Jr. and September 11th terrorist attacks. He was on the team of reporters for WABC’s extended coverage of the celebrations for the Yankees World Series wins and the installation of Edward Cardinal Egan to lead New York City’s Archdiocese.

WABC also sent Ushery on the road to cover world events including multiple reports from Haiti on the island’s political unrest, Pope John Paul II’s visits to Africa and Toronto, and the United Nation’s conference on racism in South Africa. Three years after arriving at WABC, Ushery was named anchor of a new weekend show, “Eyewitness News This Morning.” He also anchored the weekday morning newscasts and the news at noon. Ushery was later named primary fill-in for the legendary anchor, the late Bill Beutel. Ushery spent 10 years at WABC.

In 2003, he joined WNBC-TV to become the anchor of its highly rated morning newscast, "Weekend Today in New York." The show's format of hard news and features, interviews and sports, allowed Ushery to display his versatility as a newsman. One year later, Ushery was also named anchor of WNBC's weekend 6pm and 11pm newscasts. These simultaneous appointments made Ushery in effect "the face" of WNBC during the weekend, anchoring all the station's morning and evening newscasts on Saturday and Sunday. In 2006, Ushery was named co-anchor of WNBC's iconic "Live at 5" program, alongside legendary anchor Sue Simmons. After a change of programming, Ushery returned to anchor the weekend broadcasts for "News 4 New York."

As an anchor at WNBC, he has steered coverage of some of the most memorable events in recent memory including the "Miracle on the Hudson," the emergency landing of US Air Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, and the 2008 Presidential election of Barack Obama.

Ushery has also represented NBC Universal in national initiatives. He hosted the network's special program on its switch to digital in 2009, as well as "Going Green at Any Age," which examined ways to help the environment.

In 2009, Ushery conceived and launched “The Debrief with David Ushery,” which has been called a must-watch program that was nominated for a 2011 Emmy Award. The weekly, half-hour broadcast gives viewers a unique perspective on important current events. According to the show’s opening lines, “Eight million stories in the naked city. And chances are you can only keep up with a fraction of them during your hectic day. Give us just a few minutes then to bring you up to speed on What New Yorkers are talking about.”

Ushery takes a high-energy, unscripted approach for his interviews with reporters and newsmakers. Viewers are meant to feel part of the conversation about major stories. The show has garnered attention and praise for breaking boundaries and challenging long-held tenets of being an anchor. In “The Debrief,” Ushery doesn’t sit behind an anchor desk but rather moves freely around the News 4 newsroom, giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the operation. He also often goes tie-less, an informal look he sometimes wears when he anchors the more traditional evening newscasts. Ushery was noted for boldly venturing into uncharted territory for not wearing a tie.

The no tie-look also caught the attention of other media, including the New York Times and NBC “Nightly News” Anchor Brian Williams, who during a holiday television appearance with Ushery joked that viewers should consider giving Ushery a necktie. Even then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at the annual Gracie Mansion holiday party for the press, called Ushery to the podium saying he “was really excited by ‘The Debrief,’ your new show about New York.” The Mayor also remarked that Ushery seemed a “little underdressed.” Bloomberg whipped off his own tie and presented it to Ushery as a gift.

In 2010, after a “Debrief” segment featuring blogging New York City mothers, Ushery developed and launched a spin-off program. “Moms and the City and a Dad named David,” features Ushery and three mothers offering a straightforward look at life in the city from a parent’s point of view. Ushery has said the fourth mother on the program is New York City. The program airs on WNBC’s New York Nonstop cable channel.

Awards & Honors

During his long career in New York City, Ushery has been recognized for his contributions to the community. In 1993, he won an award from the National Association of Black Journalists for his series of reports on children and violence. In 1999, The Network Journal, the Black Professionals and Small Business Magazine, named Ushery as one of its “40 Under-Forty” for his significant accomplishments. In 2000, the Israeli Consulate in New York City honored Ushery for his dedicated reporting. And in 2010, Ushery was honored as a recipient of McDonald’s Faces of Black History Award.

Life

Ushery is married to TV producer Isabel Rivera. The couple has one son.

Wikipedia

#David Ushery #06-05

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

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American broadcasting has always been closely intertwined with American politics

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Louisiana's populist politician Huey Long, giving an address on CBS Radio in 1934 Louisiana State University, CC BY-SA

Local television viewers around the United States were recently alerted to a “troubling trend” that’s “extremely dangerous to democracy.”

Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of America’s dominant television station owners, commanded its anchors to deliver a scripted commentary, warning audiences about “one sided news stories plaguing our country” and media outlets that publish “fake stories … that just aren’t true.”

This might sound like a media literacy lesson, offered in the public interest. But the invocation of “biased and false news” so closely echoes charges from the Trump administration that many observers cried foul.

Sinclair’s record of broadcasting news content favorable to the Trump administration, including mandated program segments such as the “Terrorism Alert Desk,” and “Bottom Line with Boris,” with former Trump administration official Boris Epshteyn, provides additional evidence of partisan bias.

So, is it time, as some commentators are suggesting, to restore the Fairness Doctrine, which used to require broadcasters “to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was fair and balanced”? That policy, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949, was repealed in 1987. It supposedly sustained responsible political debate on the nation’s airwaves until its disappearance during the Reagan administration.

I would argue that nostalgic calls for the restoration of a golden age of civil political discussion on America’s airwaves mistake what actually happened in those decades.

Airtime for Nazis, socialists, communists

Politics and broadcasting have been consistently intertwined in American history. As I have found in my own research, the commercial broadcasting community (including advertisers) has consistently aligned news content and commentary in ways favorable to the White House.

But such episodes are often conveniently forgotten.

As Mitchell Stephens’ new biography of journalist Lowell Thomas recounts, and as numerous earlier scholars detailed, U.S. broadcast journalism originated more as subjective and biased commentary than as reportage.

The vast majority of 1930s radio “news” was politically slanted analysis by veteran journalists like Thomas, H.V. Kaltenborn and Boake Carter. Kaltenborn, for example, was notable for his anti-union commentaries.

The uncertain nature of early broadcast regulation, combined with pressure from organized interest groups and politicians, all made the exact parameters of political speech on American radio ambiguous in the 1930s.

Ninety million listeners tuned in and heard Father Charles Coughlin, known as the ‘Radio Priest’ of the Depression, defend fascists and attack Jews and communists. Library of Congress, CC BY

So the networks lent their microphones to a wide range of views from the quasi-fascists like Father Charles Coughlin (the “Radio Priest”), to homespun socialists like Huey Long and union leaders like the American Federation of Labor’s William Green. As Douglas Craig, David Goodman and numerous other scholars have pointed out, political broadcasting in the 1930s was vibrant, fertile and diverse to an extent unmatched to the present day.

For example: In 1936, both CBS and NBC aired Nazi propaganda from the Berlin Olympic Games. They also broadcast live from the Communist Party of the United States of America nominating convention. Programs like “University of Chicago Roundtable,” and “America’s Town Meeting of the Air” aired provocative political discussion that engaged and educated American audiences by exposing them to diverse viewpoints.

Airwaves rein themselves in

But as war neared, U.S. political broadcasting narrowed its range.

The Roosevelt administration began to carefully police the airwaves. CBS’ highly rated news commentator, Boake Carter, had often criticized President Roosevelt’s policies. But when he applauded the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and expressed admiration for Nazi policies, the White House acted.

As media historian David Culbert revealed, Roosevelt’s adviser Stephen T. Early secretly contacted CBS and Carter’s sponsor, General Foods, to silence Carter. Despite high ratings and a popular following, Carter’s CBS contract was not renewed. Within weeks he was gone.

Broadcasting’s self-censorship under government pressure expanded at the start of World War II. Circumscribing critical analysis and channeling commentary to the political center pleased advertisers and politicians.

With the assistance of such broadcasting pioneers as Edward R. Murrow, subjective radio news commentary morphed into the type of observational reporting now identified as broadcast journalism.

The most famous example of this shift occurred in 1943. That year Cecil Brown, CBS’s top-rated news analyst and author of the best-selling “Suez to Singapore,” dared to criticize the war effort he witnessed on the American homefront. Brown was fired, and his dismissal proved a warning to every other broadcast commentator.

Not everyone was happy with the neutering of news and opinion on American airwaves. In response to the Brown firing, FCC Chair James Lawrence Fly criticized what he considered corporate censorship.

“It’s a little strange,” Fly told the press, “to reach the conclusion that all Americans are to enjoy free speech except radio commentators.”

But removing partisan politics from broadcast journalism increased advertising revenue and proved remarkably lucrative for U.S. broadcasters during World War II.

With the lesson learned, and with the support of the advertising community, America’s broadcasters aimed to address only the “vital center” of American politics in the postwar years.

Still, politics persisted

It would, however, be a mistake to believe that the Fairness Doctrine silenced fractious political discourse on the American airwaves.

Throughout the decades that the Fairness Doctrine remained official policy, controversial political broadcasts aired regularly on American television and radio. There was Joe Pyne, whose show at its zenith in the 1960s attracted a reported 10 million viewers. Pyne insulted the hippies, Klansmen and civil rights activists he invited to his studio. Though the show is recalled today more for its outrageousness, it was a political show and Pyne propagated a conservative, law-and-order, patriotic message.

Then there’s Bob Grant, who broadcast a popular radio show in New York City throughout the 1970s. Grant’s “arch disdain for liberals, prominent black people, welfare recipients, feminists, gay people, and anyone who disagreed with him,” wrote The New York Times, “was familiar to his listeners.”

Nationally syndicated programs like “Donohue” offered liberal perspectives, and even the “CBS Evening News” brought back commentary, with veteran journalist Eric Sevareid providing perspective on the daily news each weeknight.

I’m not equating the well-reasoned, often brilliant political commentary offered by Eric Sevareid to Sinclair Broadcast Group’s transparent political advocacy. Sevareid reached a much larger percentage of the American populace than all the Sinclair newscasts combined, and he was therefore far more influential.

But to express surprise that Sinclair now shapes news content and commentary to be more hospitable to political advertising, and more supportive of the current administration, ignores the fact that political commentary has always sold well in the American commercial system.

I believe Sinclair’s management has identified an underutilized segment of the local TV news advertising market – the pro-Trump segment – as the 2018 midterm elections approach. The broadcaster is now shaping its news products to more effectively appeal to the audience for the political advertisements it seeks to sell this fall.

This economic interest closely aligns with Sinclair’s current political and regulatory imperatives. It makes the propagating of biased news content even more effective from Sinclair’s perspective.

Sinclair clearly hopes that the political consultants who purchase campaign ads, and the federal regulators who must approve their planned purchase of Tribune Broadcasting’s 42 stations, will appreciate their recent media literacy efforts.

Michael J. Socolow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Ranking The Jeopardy! Guest Hosts So Far

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When Jeopardy! GOAT contestant Brad Rutter spoke to Den of Geek earlier this year, he shared his opinion that there is only one perfect Jeopardy! host to replace the departed Alex Trebek.

“Alex,” Rutter said. “But we can’t do it, unfortunately. That’s one of the terrible things about it. I can’t even really imagine what it’s going to be like.”

With that in mind, here are our rankings of how each guest host has performed thus far.

10. Dr. Mehmet Oz

Show Air Dates: March 22, 2021 – April 2, 2021

No.

9. Savannah Guthrie

Show Air Dates: June 14, 2021 – June 25, 2021

8. Anderson Cooper

Show Air Dates: April 19, 2021 – April 30, 2021

7. Katie Couric

Show Air Dates: March 8, 2021- March 19, 2021

6. Aaron Rodgers

Show Air Dates: April 5, 2021 – April 16, 2021

5. Bill Whitaker

Show Air Dates: May 3, 2021 – May 14, 2021

4. Ken Jennings

Show Air Dates: January 4, 2021 – February 19, 2021

3. Mayim Bialik

Show Air Dates: May 31, 2021 – June 11, 2021

2. Buzzy Cohen

Show Air Dates: May 17, 2021 – May 28, 2021

Could Cohen still succeed in shepherding the game show when played by its more “normal” contestants? He certainly deserves some consideration to do so.

1. Mike Richards

Show Air Dates: February 22, 2021- March 5, 2021

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Still to come: Dr. Sanjay Gupta (Show Air Dates: June 28, 2021 – July 9, 2021), George Stephanopoulos (Show Air Dates: July 12, 2021 – July 16, 2021), Robin Roberts (Show Air Dates: July 19, 2021 – July 23, 2021), LeVar Burton (Show Air Dates: July 26, 2021 – July 30, 2021), David Faber (Show Air Dates: August 2, 2021 – August 6, 2021), Joe Buck (Show Air Dates: August 9, 2021 – August 13, 2021)

The post Ranking The Jeopardy! Guest Hosts So Far appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3v92UG7

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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omcik-blog · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/networks-newspapers-out-in-full-force-as-hurricane-harvey-soaks-texas/

Networks, newspapers out in full force as Hurricane Harvey soaks Texas

News organizations are making plans to cover Hurricane Harvey not just for the coming hours or days, but for weeks.

The hurricane is expected to stall over South Texas and parts of Louisiana into the middle of next week, which means it will be a long-duration event for emergency officials and an ongoing story for journalists in the region.

Some national news outlets have trucked in food and other essentials with the expectation that staffers may need supplies while covering widespread flooding.

Staffers at some local newsrooms have set up air mattresses and brought their pets to work because they know they’re going to be away from home for a while.

“We’re prepositioning reporters and photographers, stocking up on food and water and other prep work,” San Antonio Express-News editor Mike Leary told CNN.

The Express-News and other papers have turned off their paywalls so users have complete access to storm coverage.

And television networks have added extra hours of news coverage for what the National Hurricane Center calls the first “major” hurricane to make landfall in the United States in 12 years.

“Major” is defined as Category 3 or higher, and Harvey reached that status on Friday afternoon, hours before the eyewall reached shore.

Major coverage for a major storm

Television and newspaper reporters have been positioned along the Gulf Coast in cities like Corpus Christi and Galveston. There’s no shortage of live pictures, since there are so many local TV stations in central and south Texas.

But national news outlets have been careful to position other crews at inland locations in Houston and San Antonio, where flooding could be a problem for days to come.

ABC, for example, has two correspondents standing by in Houston. The broadcast network is scheduling six hours of special storm coverage on Saturday morning, from 5 a.m. until 11 a.m. ET, led by its weekend “Good Morning America” team.

Cable news channels covered Harvey almost exclusively on Friday — one of the only days of the year when Trump administration developments weren’t the dominant story.

CNN, Fox News and MSNBC will be live in the overnight hours when the hurricane is expected to make landfall. MSNBC said it plans to stay live until 11 p.m. ET on Saturday.

The Weather Channel began a special report at 5 a.m. on Friday and said it will stay live “until further notice.”

The Twitter storm

Hurricane Wilma was the last “major” hurricane to strike the U.S. in October 2005.

“Twitter didn’t exist when Wilma made landfall 10/24/2005,” meteorologist James Spann pointed out on Twitter.

Digital media has changed a lot even since Superstorm Sandy washed ashore in October 2012.

Newspapers like the Express-News now think in terms of “live coverage” on the web.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” managing editor Jamie Stockwell wrote to staffers at midday on Friday, telling them “our readers are depending on us for live coverage through the weekend.”

The Victoria Advocate, covering Victoria, Texas, is not printing a paper on Friday night, because its carriers have evacuated along with many other residents.

But designers are still laying out the pages of a paper and publishing the “e-edition” on the web, editor in chief Chris Cobler said.

Victoria is about 30 miles inland and is in the bullseye for historic flooding.

Web traffic to the Advocate’s web site was “easily triple a normal day” on Friday, Cobler said.

“People who left are still concerned about their homes and want to know about that,” he said.

Four reporters are embedded at emergency operations centers around the area, and about a dozen staffers are planning to live and sleep at the newspaper office for the duration.

“We’re a little nervous about power and Internet, but so far so good,” Cobler said.

Much further inland, in San Antonio, Leary said the Express-News still plans to publish in print, but he knows some deliveries will be affected.

He said he’s been receiving thankful notes from readers about the lifting of the paper’s paywall.

“I think this is a great community service,” a reader named D’mitri told him.

News you can use in a hurricane

The public service component of local media can be seen on TV, too.

Houston’s NBC affiliate, KPRC, promoted its hurricane app with this message: “We’ve experienced two historic floods in two years and that was without a hurricane. You need to be prepared.”

And the city’s CBS affiliate, KHOU, shared a story and video debunking hurricane-related rumors.

The station quoted the Houston mayor, Sylvester Turner, saying that “false forecasts and irresponsible rumors on social media are interfering with efforts by the city of Houston, and its government and news media partners, to provide accurate information to the public about the expected effects” of Harvey. “Please continue to monitor mainstream news sources for updates on the weather and act accordingly as an informed resident.”

CNNMoney (New York) First published August 25, 2017: 5:36 PM ET

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stormdoors78476 · 8 years ago

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A Couple Of Things About Jimmy Breslin

Last Wednesday, I sat down to write a piece about the late Jimmy Breslin, the newspaper columnist whose blunt yet eloquent and crafted prose captured New York and its environs as no one has since Damon Runyon.

Jimmy died a little more than a week ago and I wanted to say a few words to note ― as so many others have — how he was an inspiration to anyone who on a regular basis has to put some thoughts together in a column for publication, often straining until tiny beads of blood pop out on their foreheads.

But there were distractions. As I started to write, news came from London of the lone wolf terrorist who barreled his SUV into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, then dashed to Parliament and stabbed to death a policeman. Five died, including the attacker, and more than 50 were injured.

Then there was California Republican Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, dashing to the White House to give to Donald Trump new info he’d received, allegedly on the surveillance of Trump associates who may have been colluding with Russia to mess with the election. None of this was shared with his fellow committee members.

I think I know what Breslin would have thought of the toadying Nunes and I know for sure what Breslin thought about Trump, because he wrote about him on at least three occasions.

The last was on June 7, 1990. Breslin was describing how easily Trump played the press for suckers, simply by returning their phone calls and bragging his way onto the front page. He was able to con financial types, too, getting them to sink more money into his grandiose real estate ventures.

Breslin wrote, “All Trump has to do is stick to the rules on which he was raised by his father in the County of Queens:

Never use your own money. Steal a good idea and say it’s your own. Do anything to get publicity. Remember that everybody can be bought.

As you can see, more than 25 years ago, he had Trump down cold. In fact, another great journalist, Pete Hamill, told the New York Daily News that Breslin saw Trump as the kind of guy who’s “all mouth and couldn’t fight his way out of an empty lot.”

In another piece, Breslin described Trump as toastmaster at a celebration of greed. This was a column about the full-page ad Trump took out in the New York newspapers in 1989, demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, teenagers wrongly accused of the rape and attack of a woman jogger.

That last piece of his suggests to me that had Breslin lived to give us a column last Wednesday he would not have been as distracted as I was. He would not have been writing about the London attack or weaselly congressman Nunes. Instead, he would have tracked down the family and friends of Timothy Caughman, the 66-year-old African-African man who was stabbed to death on a Manhattan street late last Monday night, allegedly by a sword-wielding, self-proclaimed white supremacist named James Harris Jackson.

Reports indicate that Jackson intended his hate crime against Caughman as a test run for a mass murder of black men in Times Square. He’s from Maryland but thought he’d get more attention by doing his worst in the media capital of the world. He turned himself in before committing more mayhem.

Some described his victim Caughman as a man rummaging though the trash for bottles and cans. But Breslin would have gone deeper, learned from acquaintances that Caughman had attended college, worked with young people, collected autographs and took selfies with celebrities; that he was cherished by the people who knew him.

It’s possible Breslin would have cited New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, son of Breslin’s friend Mario, who said, “We must continue to deny that the ideas behind this cowardly crime have any place in democratic society.” And he probably would have pointed out that while President Trump was quick to condemn the deaths in London at the hands of a British-born Muslim, he has yet to issue a peep or a tweet about the death of Timothy Caughman at the hands of a homegrown American racist.

It would have made Breslin really mad. “Rage is the only quality,” he said, “which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

******

I was very young when I first became aware of Jimmy Breslin. It was in the days just after the death of President John F. Kennedy. One of the local newspapers in my area picked up the columns Breslin was writing about the assassination for the New York Herald Tribune.

There was the now-famous piece about Clifton Pollard, the $3.01-an-hour gravedigger who used a backhoe to dig Kennedy’s grave at Arlington Cemetery. That Pollard story was mentioned in almost every Breslin obit, but the column I especially remember was “A Death in Emergency Room One.” Much of it was about Dr. Malcolm Perry, the Dallas surgeon summoned to do what he could:

The president, Perry thought. He’s much bigger than I thought he was.

He noticed the tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt. She was standing out of the way, over against the gray tile wall. Her face was tearless and it was set, and it was to stay that way because Jacqueline Kennedy, with a terrible discipline, was not going to take her eyes from her husband’s face.

Then Malcolm Perry stepped up to the aluminum hospital cart and took charge of the hopeless job of trying to keep the 35th president of the United States from death.

I read a paperback collection of Breslin’s Herald Tribune columns and then his first book, Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? — an account of the New York Mets’ disastrous first season. They lost 120 games, still a major league baseball record. The title was a quote from Mets manager Casey Stengel, who also said, “Been in this game 100 years, but I see new ways to lose ‘em I never knew existed before.”

And yet New Yorkers loved the hapless Mets. Breslin wrote:

This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurance Rockefeller?

I wanted to write like Breslin, cracking tough and wise, just as I wanted to write like Pete Hamill and Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Molly Ivins and Chicago’s Mike Royko. After I moved to Manhattan, our paths crossed from time to time. Once I shot a television segment with Jimmy in the old Daily News city room. He talked about Sinclair Lewis’ novel Babbitt and how its portrayal of conformity and jingoism made it a perfect book for the Reagan years. On top of everything else, he was a very well-read fellow.

But our oddest encounter was in 1976, when I briefly held a job as Jimmy Breslin’s bodyguard. I am not making this up.

He was receiving an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and delivering the commencement address. A friend of mine who worked there called and asked me to accompany Breslin on the short plane ride to Worcester. In those days, Jimmy had a reputation for two-fisted drinking and I was charged by my friend with the task of getting Breslin to graduation sober.

It turned out to be just about the easiest job I ever had. Jimmy and I met up at LaGuardia Airport and the first words out of his mouth were, “I’ve got the worst effing hangover in my life.” The thought of a drink repulsed him.

So we safely arrived in Worcester. But the friend who had hired me thought it would be a swell idea to take Breslin to a working-class bar and have him interact with the locals. And not only that, my somewhat obtuse friend had invited the NBC affiliate to come shoot the proceedings for the 11 o’clock news.

This joint was hardcore, with picnic tables and folding chairs inside and sawdust on the wooden floor, a hangout for serious blue-collar imbibers. They valued their alcohol but even more their privacy because the second those bright TV lights went on in that dark saloon, patrons scattered, howling profane variations on, “What if my boss/wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend, etc., sees me!?”

Jimmy handled the difficult situation with aplomb and that night in his hotel room, hangover be damned, wrote a hell of a commencement speech. Two of the other degree recipients were Mother Teresa and federal judge Arthur Garrity, who two years before had ordered mandatory busing to desegregate Boston’s public schools. There was violence and Garrity received death threats. The college was honoring the jurist’s brave and difficult decision and in his speech, Breslin did, too:

As we are here this morning, men in power meet in Washington to discuss ways of getting around Arthur Garrity’s decisions. Is there, these men ask, some way to use polite meaningless words as a method of avoiding moral obligations? To Arthur Garrity the answer is clear. The answer is no.

Ceremony over and hangover forgotten, Breslin headed for the hotel bar, the rest of us in tow. At the graduation, he had run into a pal from his old neighborhood, a military officer of high rank, and by the end of that boozy afternoon, the two were on the phone long distance to Queens, shouting to a character who frequently popped up in Breslin’s columns, Fat Thomas the bookie.

It was quite a day. Somewhere I still have a copy of the Worcester newspaper from that afternoon with Breslin’s commencement speech featured as the lead story. Jimmy autographed the front page.

He stopped drinking a decade or so later — “Whiskey betrays you when you need it most,” he said — but kept pouring out the prose, brilliant and rude and irascible, looking out for the underdog, calling out the bad guys; always to the point and a perpetual pain in the neck, usually for the right reasons.

Of his vast range of experience, good and bad, Jimmy Breslin said, “I was about 67 people in my life.” Lucky for the rest of us, all of them could write.

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realestate63141 · 8 years ago

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A Couple Of Things About Jimmy Breslin

I think I know what Breslin would have thought of the toadying Nunes and I know for sure what Breslin thought about Trump, because he wrote about him on at least three occasions.

Breslin wrote, “All Trump has to do is stick to the rules on which he was raised by his father in the County of Queens:

Never use your own money. Steal a good idea and say it’s your own. Do anything to get publicity. Remember that everybody can be bought.

It would have made Breslin really mad. “Rage is the only quality,” he said, “which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

******

The president, Perry thought. He’s much bigger than I thought he was.

Then Malcolm Perry stepped up to the aluminum hospital cart and took charge of the hopeless job of trying to keep the 35th president of the United States from death.

And yet New Yorkers loved the hapless Mets. Breslin wrote:

But our oddest encounter was in 1976, when I briefly held a job as Jimmy Breslin’s bodyguard. I am not making this up.

It was quite a day. Somewhere I still have a copy of the Worcester newspaper from that afternoon with Breslin’s commencement speech featured as the lead story. Jimmy autographed the front page.

Of his vast range of experience, good and bad, Jimmy Breslin said, “I was about 67 people in my life.” Lucky for the rest of us, all of them could write.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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hottytoddynews · 8 years ago

Link

Photo courtesy of WLBT

This story was republished with permission by The Meek School Magazine.

When Wilson Stribling (’94), a news anchor/ reporter for WLBT in Jackson, enrolled at Ole Miss in 1992, he had no idea he would discover his passion. He was a summer school student, working toward a degree in marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“My parents lived in Oxford, so it made sense to spend part of my summer in class to keep up and knock out some credits toward my degree at SMU,” Stribling said. “One day I picked up a copy of ‘The Daily Mississippian’ that someone had left on a desk. Inside, there was an ad for anchor tryouts at ‘Newscene 12,’ as the campus newscast was then called. I had always been interested in TV news, and the ad said you didn’t have to be a journalism student, so I went to try out.”

During that time, Stribling got hands-on experience and discovered his love for broadcasting.

“The student who was running the station that summer, Jennifer Green, ‘hired’ me to come and anchor the 15-minute newscast twice a week,” Stribling said. “My first newscast was with Sharyn Alfonsi, who already had a lot of practice by then. She and Jennifer helped me along, and I got hooked. I eventually learned just about everything from them and the other students who made that newscast happen every day.”

Sharyn Alfonsi, a CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent and Ole Miss alumna, remembers working with Stribling on the campus newscast.

“He was a transfer student and walked in, and started anchoring as if he had been doing it his entire life,” Alfonsi said. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ He was so good it was maddening. I soon realized his talent was God-given, but also the result of the fact that he is a true student of journalism.”

After the summer of 1992, he attended SMU for one more semester before transferring to Ole Miss as a full-time student. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing.

Stribling said that Ole Miss really helped to prepare him for his career.

“When I was at Ole Miss, it was one of only a handful of schools with a daily, live, student-produced newscast,” Stribling said. “That was invaluable in preparing me for what a real job would require. At most other schools, an internship was the closest students could get.”

Alfonsi said Stribling may have recorded network broadcasts on a VCR.

“I believe he had a library of tapes,” she said.

Stribling poses with “Newscene 12” co-anchor Sharyn Alfonsi.

“We always tried to emulate the networks. Generally, horribly. We pulled cables out the window of Farley Hall to do ‘live shots’ …. we were so happy with it. It was basically put together with Scotch tape.

“Wilson also held wonderful dinner parties at his parents’ house in Oxford,” Alfonsi said. “Beautiful, seated dinners. We were used to hanging out at the Exxon eating chicken fingers, so we thought he was super-sophisticated. They were wonderful, memorable nights. Some of the best. He’s always been a class act.”

Before his current position, Stribling worked for news stations in Texas and Ohio. Finally, he decided that he wanted to move back to Mississippi.

“I took my résumé tape to all three stations in Jackson,” Stribling said. “The news director at WJTV sent me a rejection letter, and the one at WAPT did not respond. Dennis Smith, then the longtime news director at WLBT, called and hired me almost immediately. That was in January 1998, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Stribling began as a morning news anchor at WLBT. Ten years later, he transitioned into management as an assistant news director and then as news director, overseeing the news department’s expansion to the Fox affiliate in Jackson. In 2014, he returned to the morning anchor desk. He currently anchors two hours of news on WLBT, then two more hours on WDBD-Fox 40 along with the noon newscast on WLBT.

“Wilson Stribling did what very few other Ole Miss graduates do — he moved home after graduation and began work,” said Ralph Braseth, clinical professor and student media manager at Loyola University Chicago. “Stribling’s career is remarkable and, perhaps most important, he’s had the unusual and high privilege of serving Mississippi as an exceptional reporter and anchor. I couldn’t be prouder of an Ole Miss Rebel.”

Since being hired in 1998, Stribling has covered many big news stories, but the biggest perhaps, was his coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“The most significant story I’ve covered was Hurricane Katrina,” Stribling said. “At first, no one really knew how bad it was in Mississippi, except for those who were down on the coast. Even the reporters in the midst of it had a hard time showing the magnitude of the destruction.

“One the day after the storm, we at WLBT sent our helicopter to fly the coast and shoot as much video as they could get. As soon as they were within transmitting range of Jackson, the news director put me on the air to break into regular programming to show everyone what the chopper crew had found. We were all dumbfounded as pilot Coyt Bailey calmly described the horror we were witnessing on live TV. The folks up at NBC in New York were also watching, and they ended up using much of that video on that evening’s edition of ‘NBC Nightly News.’”

Ole Miss had a huge impact on Stribling’s life by allowing him to gain experience in the field of broadcasting even before graduating.

Stribling reports from the Square in 1993 for “Newscene 12.” Fellow journalism student Bob Waters is behind the camera.

“I have been interested in TV news for as long as I can remember, but not until I actually sat in front of a camera at Ole Miss did I believe I could pursue it professionally,” Stribling said. “The experience at the campus station and the reaction I got from my peers encouraged me to give it a shot.”

Stribling has a few words of advice for current Ole Miss journalism students.

“Write, write, write. The best writers tell the best stories, even if they never get a chance to write them down,” Stribling said.

“Journalists have to think on their feet, and you can’t compose your thoughts well enough to tell a good story if you don’t have a strong foundation in writing. Words can be powerful agents for change, and it’s a journalist’s responsibility to use them wisely. The best reporters have a strong foundation in good writing.”

By Blake Alsup, a senior, integrated marketing communications major from Ripley, Mississippi

The Meek School Magazine is a collaborative effort of journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications students with the faculty of Meek School of Journalism and New Media. Every week, for the next few weeks, HottyToddy.com will feature an article from Meek Magazine, Issue 4 (2016-2017).

For questions or comments, email us at [email protected].

Follow HottyToddy.com on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat @hottytoddynews. Like its Facebook page: If You Love Oxford and Ole Miss…

The post WLBT Anchor Reflects On Oxford, Ole Miss And The Most Significant Story Of His Career appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

#hottytoddy #olemiss #oxfordms #oxford ms #mississippi #university of mississippi #the grove

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oldguardaudio · 8 years ago

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LGBTQ Q=Queer News -> Trump Will Continue LGBTQ Worker Protection Order Signed by Obama

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politicalfilth-blog · 8 years ago

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How the Media Turned Al Qaeda into a US Ally in Syria

We Are Change

How did Al Qaeda turn into a US ally in Syria?

Article via Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

The Syrian government—a dictatorship known for imprisoning, torturing and disappearing dissidents—is easy to vilify. And over the last five years of Syria’s civil war, it has committed its share of atrocities. But there is more than one side to every story, and US media coverage has mainly reflected one side—that of the rebels—without regard for accuracy or basic context.

As the Syrian government recaptured East Aleppo from rebels in recent weeks, media outlets from across the political spectrum became rebel mouthpieces, unquestioningly relaying rebel claims while omitting crucial details about who the rebels were.

Almost always overlooked in the US (and UK) media narrative is the fact that the rebels in East Aleppo were a patchwork of Western- and Gulf-backed jihadist groups dominated by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra)—Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria—along with its ally, Ahrar al-Sham (Daily Beast, 8/8/16; Foreign Policy, 9/1/16). These groups are explicitly anti-democratic and have been implicated in human rights violations, from mass execution and child beheadings to using caged religious minorities as human shields.

In the absence of any desire to evoke a political response, US media would surely have identified East Aleppo’s rebels by the name of the most famous militant group in the world—Al Qaeda. Yet press reports regularly referred to the militant forces dominating East Aleppo simply as “rebels.”

“Women in Aleppo Choose Suicide Over Rape,” declared a headline at the Daily Beast (12/12/16). The source of this very serious claim was Abdullah Othman, a member of Jabhat Al-Shamiya, or the Levant Front, an umbrella group whose membership consists of several jihadist rebel factions. So far no evidence has been presented, at least not publicly, to substantiate Othman’s claim. But that didn’t stop his story from spreading like wildfire across social media and being picked up by Commentary (12/13/16), Mic (12/16/16), Elle (12/13/16) and Foreign Policy (12/16/16), among others.

NBC News (12/13/16) reported that “scores of civilians were burned alive by regime forces.” The source for this accusation was unspecified “reports from Arab media.” The Independent (12/17/16) warned of “house-to-house murder.” The source was British politician David Miliband. The UN (12/13/16) cited “credible reports” of 82 civilians being shot “on the spot” by pro-government forces. While this is certainly plausible, the UN, which was not on the ground in East Aleppo, has yet to follow up on the matter.

US media also promoted accusations made by self-described “media activists” in East Aleppo warning that the Syrian regime was going to slaughter them. State Department spokesperson John Kirby called the messages “brave” and praised those who posted them as providing “independent third-party media coverage” of the horrors in Aleppo.

But information coming out of rebel areas is far from independent. On the contrary, it is tightly controlled by the jihadist groups that control these areas. These groups do not tolerate activism. They jail, torture and summarily execute activists, as well as lawyers, humanitarian workers, journalists and minorities. This should raise questions about anyone purporting to be an activist from rebel areas. But in the Western press, it doesn’t, which is why one of the most widely featured media personalities out of rebel-held Aleppo, Bilal Abdul Kareem, has been uncritically promoted by CNN (12/16/16) and even the usually adversarial Intercept (6/30/16), despite a well-established record of pushing hyper-sectarian propaganda for extremist groups (AlterNet, 12/29/16).

If media outlets were quick to grant legitimacy to rebel accusations, they ignored or downplayed rebel atrocities.

For example, when the rebels burned several buses (and killed the drivers) meant to evacuate the sick and injured from two besieged Shiite villages in Idlib, the New York Times (12/18/16) buried the details of the incident deep inside in the 19th paragraph of a story on evacuations.

Reports that the rebels shot at civilians attempting to flee to government areas and withheld food and humanitarian aid from civilians rarely made it into Western media reports.

While both sides have accused the other of carrying out massacres in Aleppo, only rebel accusations received widespread US media coverage. But the only evidence to emerge so far points to the rebels as culprits. Ahead of their evacuation from East Aleppo, rebel groups reportedly executed an estimated 100 Syrian soldiers they were holding prisoner, according to pro-government forces. The bodies were found in a local school. Despite photos, corroborating video evidence and the fact that rebels have carried out mass summary executions of Syrian soldiers taken prisoner in Aleppo in the past, US media outlets mostly ignored it. One of the groups alleged to be behind the killings is Nouriddeen Al-Zinki, a recipient of US weapons. (Months ago, Al-Zinki fighters videotaped themselves beheading a child. The gruesome act was met with a shrug by the group’s Western backers.) Russia also reported finding mass graves of tortured civilians and booby traps during its sweep of East Aleppo, which received little to no attention.

If none of this were true, the loathing that many Syrians in government areas express for the rebels, and for the Western media who glorify them, would be hard to explain.

In November, I visited government-held areas of Syria, where the overwhelming majority (an estimated 75 percent) of Syrians live, and I witnessed a side of the conflict that US media outlets have almost entirely overlooked. It’s as if the views and well-being of some 17 million Syrians don’t matter, simply because they live on the government side.

This rule seems to apply across the media spectrum. An editor at a major progressive publication rejected on-the-ground reporting from government areas, telling me it was a futile journalistic endeavor because the Syrian government watches everything, and Syrians are too terrified of the secret police to say what they really think.

While it’s true that Syrians are limited in their capacity to criticize the government, it doesn’t justify ignoring them. And the situation on the ground isn’t so black and white. Behind closed doors and in private conversations, many Syrians were sharply critical of the Assad regime. Yet they still supported the government, largely out of even stronger opposition to the religious fundamentalism and brutality of the armed groups, whom they view as foreign-backed religious fanatics who have invaded their country and terrorized them and their families.

I’m still haunted by what I saw at Al-Razi Hospital in what was then government-held West Aleppo. I watched as one ambulance after another dropped off civilians wounded by rebel mortars fired into residential neighborhoods around the clock. Medical staff quickly went to work on a man whose chest was pierced by a piece of twisted metal. A frantic woman lingered close by, shouting, “He’s the only son I have left!” The man was soon pronounced dead and the woman collapsed in agony.

Down a crowded hall, 10-year-old Fateh stood on a blood-smeared floor, crying beside a gurney where his 15-year-old brother, Mohammad, was lying. Blood had soaked through the bandage on his leg, but the medical staff was too busy with more life-threatening injuries to take notice. The boys were lucky to be alive. They had been moving furniture out of the house with their younger cousins earlier in the day when they were struck by rebel mortars. Their 6-year-old cousin, a girl, was in the ICU. Their 4-year-old cousin, a boy, had been killed.

Across the street, grieving families waited outside the morgue to identify the bodies of their recently deceased loved ones. A group of sobbing children explained to me how they had watched their father die that morning from the balcony of their apartment. A rebel mortar struck him as he was parking his car. Meanwhile, a shell-shocked father told me his 10-year-old son was shot and killed by a sniper while fetching water on the roof.

A grief-stricken woman, mourning the loss of her husband, cursed the government for not hitting the rebels—or “terrorists,” in her words—hard enough. Her family members agreed, complaining that the Syrian government was being too soft on the armed groups that they blamed for destroying their city.

Underneath all the grief and calls for revenge was exhaustion. After five years of war, these people were tired. I didn’t meet a single Syrian in the government areas I visited who hadn’t lost friends and family since the war started. But their suffering, with a few minor exceptions, has been largely disappeared from Western media, probably because the people most responsible for it are supported by the West.

Even those who expressed disapproval of Russia’s involvement in their country told me they hold the US and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—most responsible for the disintegration of their country.

These sentiments totally contradict one of US media’s most pernicious lies—that US inaction allowed the bloodshed in Syria to continue with impunity.

“Many thousands of people have been killed in Aleppo…but Washington shrugs,” lamented the New York Times (12/14/16). “The United States’ inaction in Syria has transformed our country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” complained Leon Wieseltier in the Washington Post (12/15/16).

But Washington has intervened (FAIR.org, 10/1/15)—and by doing so, it prolonged the bloodshed and empowered Al Qaeda.

Despite being warned about the extremist and violently sectarian ideology that dominated the opposition as early as November 2011, the Obama administration spent, according to the Washington Post (6/12/15), a colossal $1 billion-a-year training and funneling weapons to Al Qaeda–linked extremists in order to weaken the Syrian government.

In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2016, Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter IS, warned that “Nusra is now Al Qaeda’s largest formal affiliate in history.” According to US intelligence officials, Nusra is starting to plot attacks against the US.

In other words, the US government outsourced its war against the Syrian government to Al Qaeda, and Americans have no idea, because corporate media continue to promote lies about Obama’s so-called inaction.

Many US media consumers might be shocked to learn that the Syrian uprising was never particularly popular in Aleppo. The rebels, with help from their American benefactors, invaded and captured Aleppo’s eastern neighborhoods by force in 2012. At times they laid siege to Aleppo’s government-held areas, cutting off access to drinking water, electricity and food. American politicians cheered the territorial gains. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of State, expressed hope that the rebels taking East Aleppo would “provide a base for further actions by the opposition.”

With its ground forces already overstretched fighting an insurgency across the country, the Syrian government responded, as it often has, with overwhelming and devastating air power, which Western leaders routinely denounced. But the criminal conduct of the rebels failed to provoke similar outrage.

Many whose neighborhoods were occupied by rebel forces fled early on to government areas or neighboring countries. Their homes were looted in their absence and turned into operating bases. Those who stayed were subjected to strict interpretations of Islamic law that closely resembled the brutal practices imposed by ISIS.

Corporate media’s own accounts periodically reflected these realities, back when Western journalists still ventured into rebel areas.

“We waited and waited for Aleppo to rise, and it didn’t. We couldn’t rely on them to do it for themselves so we had to bring the revolution to them,” a rebel commander told Reuters in July 2012. The article went on to note that the fighters were “lounging inside a school taken over by the rebels as a temporary base” in an area that “appeared to be completely deserted by residents. Fighters were using houses as bases to sleep in.”

“Around 70 percent of Aleppo city is with the regime. It has always been that way. The countryside is with us and the city is with them,” confessed another rebel commander to the Guardian in August 2012.

“In Aleppo, I heard Salafi jihadists talk of slaying the minority Alawites, and call for both the immediate support of America, and its immediate demise,” reported the New York Times in October 2012.

Indeed, schools, medical facilities and residential buildings were transformed into military bases and sharia courts. The Children’s Hospital in Aleppo became a notorious prison and torture facility where several Western hostages, including journalist James Foley, who was later beheaded by the Islamic State, were held.

By late 2013, rebel kidnappings of journalists were so rampant that major Western media outlets collectively urged the Syrian opposition to put a stop to the abductions.

At the same time, Western governments poured millions of dollars into rebel propaganda made up of authentic-looking rebel media outlets and NGOs, like the White Helmets, to glorify the armed groups and agitate for more forceful Western military intervention against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

No longer able to travel to rebel areas for fear of being kidnapped or worse, journalists were relegated to covering the war from Beirut and Istanbul, becoming entirely dependent on Western-funded propaganda to fill the information vacuum.

Falling in line behind the geopolitical interests of their governments, Western media went about whitewashing and romanticizing jihadist groups as liberators and protectors adored by the Syrians living under them, even as their own reporters were being kidnapped, ransomed and even shot by Western-backed rebels.

Take Liz Sly of the Washington Post. In a 2013 on-the-ground report from East Aleppo (3/19/13), Sly details the brutality of Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, which had taken over the area and turned the city’s Eye Hospital into its headquarters. Yet as the government recaptured East Aleppo, Sly and her colleagues omitted any mention of Al Qaeda among the rebels, while promoting the claims of rebel activists who operate under their control.

The cognitive dissonance is truly astounding in light of US media’s fawning coverage of similar military offensives in cities controlled by ISIS in both Syria and Iraq, where US-backed forces have employed many of the same tactics condemned in Aleppo.

In the Syrian city of Manjib, not far from Aleppo, US-backed ground forces imposed a crippling siege that left tens of thousands of civilians hungry as US airstrikes pounded the city, killing up to 125 civilians in a single attack. In Iraq, the US also used airstrikes to drive ISIS out of Ramadi and Fallujah, leaving behind flattened neighborhoods that resemble the ruins of East Aleppo. In Fallujah, 140 people reportedly died from lack of food and medicine during the siege.

After ISIS was ejected from Fallujah, NBC News (6/17/16) ran the headline: “Iraqi Forces Enter Central Fallujah, Liberate Key Areas from ISIS.” In striking contrast, during Al Qaeda’s removal from East Aleppo, NBC (12/14/16) declared: “Aleppo Is Falling. What Does This Mean For Assad, ISIS and Russia?”

Since 9/11, US corporate media have portrayed Al Qaeda as a monstrous organization whose existence justifies a global war without end. Who could have predicted that by 2016, these same media outlets would become Al Qaeda’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders?

This article (How the Mainstream Media Turned Al Qaeda into a US Ally in Syria) by Rania Khalek originally appeared on Fair.org and is licensed Creative Commons 3.0.

The post How the Media Turned Al Qaeda into a US Ally in Syria appeared first on We Are Change.

from We Are Change http://wearechange.org/media-turned-al-qaeda-us-ally-in-syria/

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