#pbs news

[vinnfeyntheinsane]

To the credit of PBS, they have not been bullshitting about Israel/Hamas. Here's a highlight:

REPORTER: We now turn to retired Israeli Colonel Pnina Sharvit Baruch. She was a legal adviser to the Israel Defense Forces and is now a senior research fellow at the Israel Institute for National Security Studies. So, Pnina, as you heard, Prime Minister Netanyahu  said the civilian deaths were a tragic mistake in this strike. It was also a mistake, you  will remember, when an aid convoy from World Central Kitchen was hit, killing seven. And one of the biggest questions people have is why one of the best-funded and best trained militaries  in the world keeps making these deadly mistakes. What would you say to that?

PNINA SHARVIT BARUCH: This is a terrible situation. We are trapped in this war threatening us in Israel, and we are being attacked from all sides. It feels to us an existential  threat. So we know we look strong. We are strong, but the threats are huge. The whole issue of Rafah, why is Rafah important, is because this is the land border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. And we know that they get from there their supply. There are tunnels going underneath, a lot of tunnels in Rafah.

REPORTER: But I should point out that it was the ICJ (International Court of Justice) ruling just last week...that ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah...how was this military strike in Rafah not in violation of that order?

PNINA BARUCH: The order didn't say that Israel must halt its operations in Gaza...it said that Israel must halt its military offensive...in Rafah which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life in Gaza that could bring about the physical destruction of people in Gaza. This is limited to what is covered by the genocide convention, Israel is not carrying out a genocide-

REPORTER: Uh- reading the same text you are, it says, the state of Israel shall immediately halt it's military offensive...that could bring about physical destruction in whole or in part. These 45 civilians were killed. That's physical destruction, in whole or in part, is it not?

ISRAELI COL. PNINA BARUCH: Yes, but genocide has the element of intent, and the idea here was that Israel has to do what it can to avoid destruction, and indeed what happened here is a tragedy, but what has to be checked is how did it happen. Israel...according to the initial explanation is that it as using accurate ammunition, and perhaps there was some fire that broke out [Imagine fire breaking out during the bombing of a flammable tent camp]. Civilians get killed, it is terrible, it is tragic, it doesn't mean there is an intention, it definitely doesn't mean there is a genocidal intention.

REPORTER: Pnina, as you've heard, some will argue that Hamas is inseperable from the Palestinian national movement that sprang from oppression, from a lack of freedom, these are conditions that still exist today, and killing every last fighter won't eliminate that. What do you say to that?

PNINA: We have to beat the Hamas...at least the military structure of the Hamas. If Hamas continues to control the Gaza strip...there will never be a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and both Israelis and Palestinians will pay the price.

(The conversation continues, the report ends, and a title card shows)

TITLE CARD: 285 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza or along the Israeli border since the beginning of the ground operation.

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

“A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their points. A conspiracy is a battle cry of a person with insufficient data.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson

"In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, far-right extremist groups and politicians are spreading false claims and conspiracy theories about the disaster and the government's response." #PBSNews

[uboat53]

Okay, this one's been building for a while. It's going to be long even for my usual standards. Strap in for a really LONG RANT (TM).

INTRODUCTION

Over the last 4 years, the news media has substantially degraded in their ability to do any significant analysis of political events. Maybe it's the drop in viewership after the Trump presidency, but something's off. People calling themselves political journalists are falling for the stupidest nonsense and failing even the most basic understanding of politics.

MY FIRST INKLING

Over the last few decades, I've put together a list of journalists who are consistently interesting and insightful. I look for their pieces when they come out and note when they change publications.

Over the last 4 years, however, nearly all of them have disappeared from major publications. David Weigel left the Washington Post and Jordan Weissman left Slate, both ended up at Semafor. William Saletan left Slate and Charlie Sykes no longer writes for The New York Times, both are now at The Bulwark. Matthew Yglesias left Vox and ended up writing on SlowBoring (although he occasionally also writes for Bloomberg News these days).

What do all of these have in common? All of them left fairly large, well-read publications and ended up at smaller, more niche publications. And they're not alone, a huge amount of competent, capable, and insightful journalists have quietly led an exodus from major publications since the end of the Trump presidency leaving behind journalists who don't seem to be nearly at the same level.

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS

Take, for example, that we've all known for the last 4 years that Trump was going to run for president again. It wasn't a mystery. So why haven't we seen any coverage of him? Yes, he's not on Twitter anymore, but he still rants and raves on Truth Social. Yes, he's not president anymore, but he still does rallies all the time. Who's covering any of that? Do you know what he's said? Do you know if anything has changed about him since 2020?

Seriously, did you see any coverage of the insane things Trump has said or done over the last four years? Have you seen coverage of the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 plan? It's been four years, has the media actually vetted the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties? I mean, sure, he was president before, but it's been four years. Is there anything new we should know about? I already know a bunch of new things about him, but not because I read about it in major publications of the US news media.

The same lack of knowledge was clear when the media was covering the legislative battles in the first half of Biden's term. You had enough reporters shouting questions at Biden about why he didn't comment more about negotiations on his bipartisan infrastructure bill that he had to remind them all that it was a stupid question. Negotiations rely on trust and the easiest way to destroy that trust is to blab about everything you've discussed. Any reasonably competent journalist would know that, but apparently not the White House Press Corps.

You see the same thing happen again and again and again if you look for it. Coverage of Manchin and Sinema's antics during the legislative battles was nothing more than surface level commentary and did nothing to dig into their tactics and strategies or their goals and objectives. Coverage of Mitch McConnell's freeze-ups basically added no new information after the first hour. Heck, if you even wanted to know what Congressional negotiators were negotiating about in the various bills that they worked on, you'd have to look it up yourself.

TRUMP COVERAGE

What's brought this to a head for me is noticing the coverage of Trump over the last year. I've read tons and tons of detailed and nuanced articles from numerous major publications about his legal travails, but how many have there been about his politics and political fortunes? I'm sure you've read in detail how his New York City trial went, but how many articles have you read about how most of his stories at his rallies devolve into unintelligible nonsense? You've no doubt read about how the Supreme Court granted him a level of immunity from prosecution, but have you read any stories about the likely results of his economic plans?

What you're seeing is an example of how barren the political news landscape has become. Trump's trials are covered by the legal news team, a team that, at most publications and outlets still has a high degree of expertise and experience in their subject, and it shows! The comparison of the legal coverage of Trump to the political coverage of Trump is particularly damning, it's a team at the top of its game standing next to a team that clearly hasn't ever played before.

Tell me, have you seen any analysis of Trump's tax plans? Have you seen anyone discuss the likely effects of his deportation and immigration plans? Has anyone even looked at Project 2025, the plan that a large group of likely Trump staffers have come up with to guide his hoped for second term? And, once you start looking around, you'll realize this isn't even just a Trump problem! What do you know about Biden's proposed policies? Is he proposing any new ones or is he just running on the same things as last time?

THE DEBATE AND POST-DEBATE COVERAGE

Watching the coverage of the 2024 campaign is what really started crystalizing this in my head, but what pushed it over the edge and made me write this all out is the coverage of the debate. Look, we can all agree that Biden had a bad night, but is that literally the only thing a reputable journalist could write about?

Do you know how many falsehoods each candidate uttered that night? How about policies, did they mostly confirm their proposed policies or were there some surprises? We know that Biden seemed confused, but what about Trump? Was he in touch with reality? After all, it's much easier to seem confident and clear in something that you're making up on the spot than something that you have to remember; was he confidently spouting nonsense?

Honestly, the lack of journalistic professionalism didn't start with the coverage after the debate, it was on the stage as well. CNN had two journalists reading the questions, but why? They didn't do any follow-up, they didn't do any fact checking; why did we need journalists on the stage at all? They could have found a random guy off the street or a fourth grader if all they needed the moderater to do was ask questions. Heck, why not advertise your new AI? AI doesn't actually understand what it's reading, but clearly that isn't necessary anyways!

And the post-debate calls for Biden to resign from major outlets have been similarly devoid of actual journalism, resembling celebrity "news" coverage more than they do real investigation. What would it take for Democrats to replace Biden on the ticket? Who would/should be the replacement? If it's not Kamela Harris, what challenges would come up from bypassing the first black woman vice-president for a (likely) white guy? If it is Kamela Harris, what challenges and baggage does she bring to the race? Do any of the proposed candidates do better than Biden in general polling at this point?

If you don't know the answers to any of these questions, that's okay! Apparently real journalists don't even know enough to be asking the questions!

THE CLINTON AFFAIR

Haunting all of this is that the American news media royally screwed up in exactly the same way not that long ago. Eight years ago, the news media descended on the Clinton e-mail story like a pack of rabid piranhas, completely ignoring just about any other story. Every major news outlet (except for those in the right-wing news ecosystem which have no shame at all) has admitted that their coverage of the 2016 election was poor and that they focused on the e-mail story to the exclusion of actually vetting the two candidates, and yet here we are again.

And, for the record, there was literally nothing to the Clinton e-mail scandal. Clinton used a personal e-mail server much as Secretary Powell had done before her with permission from the State Department. Every classified e-mail on her server was found to have come from others inappropriately sending it to her rather than her sending it out. And yet, coverage dominated the 2016 election, driving a drip-drip-drip cycle that damaged Clinton immensely and distracted from any coverage of Trump's very real issues.

Coming out of that election, most news outlets committed to higher journalistic standards. They committed to more aggressive fact-checking, more investigation, and less hysterical coverage of single issues to the detriment of broader coverage, and, during the four years of Trump's term, they largely did that to varying degrees of success. That, more than anything, is what makes their recent decline that much more eggregious. They know how to do this correctly and are actively choosing not to.

WHERE TO FIND GOOD JOURNALISM

And now the answer to the question I've posed obliquely this whole rant: if so much of political journalism is bad, where can I find good journalism?

Honestly, there's not a lot of it out there, but it does exist. NPR, as usual, is a bastion of great journalism. They are sometimes prey to the same instincts that lead the broader media astray, but they've done a great job keeping in place the structures they built as a response to the 2016 election and Trump in general such as active fact-checking and analysis immediately after each interview rather than letting it wait until a lie or piece of misinformation has solidified. PBS is similarly effective in this way; public media, as always, remains pretty much the best large outlet for information in this country.

The Daily Show is also a great source for journalism which is a sad commentary on journalism because, as should be obvious, these people are comedians and not journalists. Still, they do great work, better than most actual journalists because they take seriously the charge to dig deeper for the real story and speak truth to power.

Outside of that, there aren't really any large media outlets that I would strongly recommend. There are, however, smaller news organizations that are doing good work.

Semafor, for example, has a lot of great analysis of politics and actually asks the kinds of questions I noted above and sometimes even finds answers to them. The Bulwark is another one, though it tends to do broader political analysis rather than up-to-the-minute reporting. There are also individual journalists and writers who put forth very insightful analysis in larger publications such as Fred Kaplan at Slate, Joshua Keating at Vox, and Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg, but these are generally the exception to the broader coverage at those outlets. There are also writers at smaller publications like Julia Ioffe who now writes for Puck, though I can't recommend the whole publication.

Honestly, though, it's pretty barren out there. I'd love to have more sources of information that can check each other and make sure I'm not being pulled off into a lane of misinformation, but I'm not finding much out there. Please, if you find any, let me know, I'd love to have more good sources.

SUMMARY/CONCLUSION

The American political news media, which improved significantly as a response to Trump, seems to have lost most of its institutional capacity since his defeat in 2020 to the point where they are now reduced to covering only a single story for days on end without adding any meaningful information or insightful analysis. Even a dedicated news hound like me is left frustrated with the difficulty of finding meaningful coverage and the drumbeat of nonsense is preventing this country from having a real discussion about the real issues in the upcoming presidential election which may be one of the most consequential of our lifetimes.

Don't get me wrong, Biden had a bad debate, but is that really the ONLY THING going on in politics right now? It isn't, but you certainly wouldn't know it from the sheer volume of "think pieces" and "breaking news" articles dominating the headlines these days.

And if it were just that, if it were just this one instance where political journalists were falling down on the job, I would accept it, that kind of thing happens from time to time, but it's not. Time after time on issue after issue for the last four years, political news generally at the nation's largest outlets has shown itself to be incapable of actually covering and analyzing the section of news that it supposedly specializes in with any kind of depth or nuance, instead, descending time and time again into tabloid nonsense.

I know where to find good information, but it takes a lot more digging than I'm used to and people don't follow the news as voraciously as I do shouldn't be expected to do that kind of digging just to have the bare minimum of information necessary to carry out their duties as citizens.

I don't have any solutions here, I just hope that you know that what you're seeing on most TV, radio, and newspapers/online these days is just a shadow of the information you should be getting. Let me know if I'm missing something, because it's getting really depressing.

[mebssann]

local old man finally gets new clothes

[nerdiertides]

PBS News examines the rise of anime's popularity in the U.S. in new report

(Featured Image Source: PBS NewsHour / © 2024 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)) There is no denying that anime has quickly taken hold of pop culture around the world, leaving the space of niche media sourced from tape trading and purchasing bootlegs in 1970s and 1980s,��to a staple of mainstream entertainment in the past decade. To an outsider, or for those who didn’t grow up during it’s (shout…

[npr-stan]

This documentary by PBS shows how the "less-lethal force" officers are often trained to use leads to deaths across the country, highlights the lack of appropriate training, and shows how mental health episodes are escalated into deadly scenarios by officers.

[plumbum-art]

"We did it!" "Well done, Mr. Fell"

1941, West End London. Back in the dressing room after their bullet catch trick

[david1m]

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tage:

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The U.S. surgeon general on Tuesday declared gun violence a public health crisis, driven by the fast-growing number of injuries and deaths involving firearms in the country.

The advisory issued by Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation's top doctor, came as the U.S. grappled with another summer weekend marked by mass shootings that left dozens of people dead or wounded.

"People are scared in many communities I visit around the country to do normal things like go to school or the grocery store or work and they're worried about the risk to their life," Murthy said in an interview with "CBS Mornings" on Tuesday.

To drive down gun deaths, Murthy calls on the U.S. to ban automatic rifles, introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons.

None of those suggestions can be implemented nationwide without legislation passed by Congress, which typically recoils at gun control measures. Some state legislatures, however, have enacted or may consider some of the surgeon general's proposals.

Murthy said there is "broad agreement" that gun violence is a problem, citing a poll last year that found most Americans worry at least sometimes that a loved one might be injured by a firearm. More than 48,000 Americans died from gun injuries in 2022.

"People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe," Murthy told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Murthy's advisory promises to be controversial and will certainly incense Republican lawmakers, most of whom opposed Murthy's confirmation — twice — to the job over his statements on gun violence.

Murthy has published warnings about troubling health trends in American life, including social media use and loneliness. He's stayed away from issuing a similar advisory about gun violence since his 2014 confirmation as surgeon general was stalled and nearly derailed by the firearm lobby and Republicans who opposed his past statements about firearms.

Murthy ended up promising the Senate that he did "not intend to use my office as surgeon general as a bully pulpit on gun control."

Then-President Donald Trump dismissed Murthy in 2017, but President Joe Biden nominated Murthy again to the position in 2021. At his second confirmation hearing, he told senators that declaring guns a public health crisis would not be his focus during a new term.

But he has faced mounting pressure from some doctors and Democratic advocacy groups to speak out more. A group of four former surgeon generals asked the Biden administration to produce a report on the problem in 2022.

"TAKE THIS ISSUE OUT OF THE REALM OF POLITICS"

"It is now time for us to take this issue out of the realm of politics and put it in the realm of public health, the way we did with smoking more than a half century ago," Murthy told the AP.

A 1964 report from the surgeon general that raised awareness about the dangers of smoking is largely credited with snubbing out tobacco use and precipitating regulations on the industry.

Children and younger Americans, in particular, are suffering from gun violence, Murthy notes in his advisory called "Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America." Suicide by gun rates have increased significantly in recent years for Americans under the age of 35. Children in the U.S. are far more likely to die from gun wounds than children in other countries, the research he gathered shows.

"My hope is that if we understand this as a kid's issue that we will raise it on the priority list, that we will see it not as a political issue but as a public health issue that should concern all of us," Murthy said.

In addition to new regulations, Murthy calls for an increase on gun violence research and for the health system — which is likely to be more amenable to his advisory — to promote gun safety education during doctor visits.

"The good news is there's a lot we can do," he said on "CBS Mornings." "There are, for example, community violence intervention programs that we can invest in. There are safe storage education programs that we can expand. There are firearm risk reduction strategies like background checks and other measures that would seek to create time and space between firearms and individuals who would seek to harm themselves and others."

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported rates of gun injuries last year remained above levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic for a fourth straight year. Preliminary CDC data on gun deaths also show rates last year remained worse than in 2019 nationwide, despite a slowdown off of peak levels in 2020 and 2021.

A new FBI report released Monday showed that active shooters violently targeted members of the public across the U.S. at a rate that was 89% higher from 2019 to 2023 than in the previous five-year period. Last year, 105 individuals were killed during those active shooting incidents, the highest level in recent years.

The public safety numbers released Monday by federal investigators showed a mix of slight year-over-year improvements in some areas of concern across the country — including a 4% decrease in active shootings in 2023 compared to 2022 — and small drops in other metrics, like total casualties and "mass killing" events.

Throughout the U.S., 244 victims were shot by active shooters last year; 139 were injured and 105 were killed. Compared to the previous year, total casualty rates — injuries and deaths combined — were down from 313 in 2022, but five more people were killed in 2023 than in 2022.

Those incidents represent just a fraction of the overall toll of gun violence. On average, gun homicides killed more than 53 people per day in the U.S. in 2022, according to CDC data.

[andva-ri]

☆ yucky texture ☆

☆ ko-fi | patreon | commissions | prints ☆

[onionninjasstuff]

[seafearing]

[eggplantgifs]

Donovan Carrillo: SexyBack / 4 Minutes » 2024 World Championships

[relaxedstyles]

[unsolicited-opinions]

Some good examples of how Western media downplays attacks ON Israel:

In the opening minute of this NYT podcast, the NYT describes the ~180 bus-sized ballistic missiles launched at Israel by Iran as "...the largest missile attack on Israeli territory in the country's history."

Remove the bias, and it would instead acurrately be described as "the largest ballistic missile attack ever launched."

See the difference? Note how it changes the story?

PBS does the same thing:

Source

No, PBS. This was the largest missile attack ever launched, by any nation, against any nation.

I subscribe to the NYT. I'm a PBS member. This is profoundly disappointing, but no longer surprising.

[drawlody]

Finn, Simon, Marcy, and PB group hug but it just ends up with Finn hugging 3 people at once (tis still enjoyable :3)

A lil bit of lovin for everyone:D

Also Marcy and her face shirt B)

OH LAWD HERE HE COME

I struggled with this pose lmao like i cannot find a ref for this