One of the most helpful and interesting features of X since Elon Musk took over Twitter and transformed it is Community Notes. Most of the time, the feature serves as a way to hold users and media outlets accountable for what they say on the platform, often with a nice dose of snark. Granted, it doesn’t work sometimes, but Community Notes has been useful and often fun.
This month, a reader e-mailed to question the use of the term “far-right” in news articles. Who defined this term, and does it not convey an editorial opinion rather than fact?
The reader was referring to coverage of the European Union elections, which took place June 6 through 9. Indeed, “far-right” has appeared in headlines, reported news, analysis, explainers and opinion pieces in The Globe, as in other news media. But how is it different from “hard-right,” “extreme-right,” “alt-right” or just plain “right-wing?”
There’s no nuance about it. It’s shorthand for Nazi.
Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis is being denounced this week after the end of the short-lived tenure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and delivering a truth bomb to the staff. Lewis told them that they have lost their audience and “people are not reading your stuff.” It was a shot of reality in the echo chambered news outlet and the response was predictable. However, Lewis just might save this venerable newspaper if he follows his frank talk with meaningful reforms to bring balance back to the Post.
h/t DS
Media Matters, a nonprofit organization that smears conservatives, announced Thursday it laid off dozens of employees, including management and journalists, and appeared to cite its legal battle with Elon Musk as cause for the dismissals.
On Friday’s PBS NewsHour, the Week in Review segment dove into the New York Times “scoop” that the flag flew upside down for a few days in January 2021 outside the home of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. This was Big News? Two years ago, when a man showed up outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house intending to assassinate him, the NewsHour didn’t find that worthy on Friday June 10, 2022.
At 92 years old, Dan ‘Kenneth’ Rather returned to the scene of the crime, or rather a CBS morning show, to promote a Netflix documentary that explains how he was able to send a laptop running a copy of Microsoft Word back to the Vietnam War era in order to prove that George W. Bush dodged the draft.
The latest faux scandal du jour that has media pundits and Liberal members breathlessly raising alarm bells has to do with Pierre Poilievre’s recent visit to an encampment of people protesting against the federal carbon tax on the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Protests sprung up around the country on April 1 as the tax increased, and many encampments of protesters in RVs have remained in place since. The encampments may be unpleasing to the eye and surely contain some folks with rather strong views, but they have remained peaceful and are hardly the beginning of a national revolution.
Top editors at NPR are defending the outlet’s journalism after a scathing op-ed from a former employee who argues the public broadcaster has lost its way.
Uri Berliner, who worked at NPR for more than 20 years, wrote in a piece published this week for The Free Press that “those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online” are getting “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
NPR is the CBC is government propaganda.
You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
This is a disgusting piece. Not just because of the framing that people on the right would celebrate or be happy about anyone being gang raped because it helps their agenda but what happened to “believe” all women? Why are the rapes referred to as alleged? Garbage piece @CTVNews. https://t.co/RzVFYIF166
— Jacqui Budden (@JacquiDelaney) February 11, 2024
A left-wing German publication that falsely accused the nationalist AfD party of planning to “deport millions of Germans with a migrant background,” has come under fire for altering its story—again.
As we previously reported, Correctiv, a partly Soros-funded investigative website, made explosive claims earlier this month of a top-level meeting between AfD officials and members of the European ‘ethnocultural transnational’ Identitarian Movement—joined by a small number of officials from the centre-right CDU—alleging the existence of a right-wing plot to deport millions of migrants, including those with German citizenship. The article resulted in hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets around Germany to protest against ‘far-right extremism.’
The much-touted media hit piece that propelled a wave of anti-AfD protests in Germany— including calls for the party itself to be banned—has come under fire this week as one of its lead journalists described heavy exaggeration in the German press.
Anette Dowideit, the deputy editor of the left-wing Correctiv media outlet, in an interview on national TV on Sunday evening, stated that, contrary to media coverage, there was no direct talk of mass deportations—’remigration’— in a meeting between nationalist migration-critical Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and key figures on the radical right.
This raises serious questions about the credibility of the reporting, especially given its role in prompting protests and calls for political repression.
Slightly more Canadians say the media cannot be trusted to make decisions in the public interest as say they have trust in the media to act in the public interest, according to internal federal government polls obtained by Global News.
But the same polling shows high levels of distrust among many other institutions: provincial and territorial governments, Canadian financial institutions, the federal government and social media platforms.
Media, government and institutions lie? Imagine that … TDS, Russiagate, Trudeau, Mass Immigration, Islam, DEI, Multicultuaralism, Diversity, Climate change, “Far Right”, Covid, China, racism, mass graves … and the beat goes on.
A “thermonuclear” lawsuit by the world’s richest man against a media outlet over a series of tweets? To quote Westly from The Princess Bride: “Get used to disappointment.”
The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company pic.twitter.com/55vl7PspaQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023
Many Canadians have little faith in the news media, a new Statistics Canada survey has found.
Fifty-three percent of those polled said they did not place much trust in the information and news they receive from the media. Fewer than one in six people (16 percent) reported a high level of trust in the media, while 32 percent of respondents said they had only a moderate level of trust.
