Media, administration deal with conflicts REALLY?????
It's all but a journalistic commandment: Thou shalt not have a vested interest in the story you're covering. Otherwise, a personal entanglement could color a reporter's neutrality or cloud public perceptions of fairness. An obvious area of concern: when a journalist's relatives or spouse is part of the news.
So what to make of all the family ties between the news media and the Obama administration?
.According to the news media, nothing much at all. News organizations say they've worked out the conflicts — real or potential — involving their journalists. But that hasn't stopped a few eyebrows from being raised.
The list of prominent news people with close White House relations includes ABC News President Ben Sherwood, who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama. His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist. CNN's deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Further, White House press secretary Jay Carney's wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC. And NPR's White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel's office in April.
Conservatives have suggested that these relationships may play a role in how the media cover Obama, specifically in their supposedly timid approach to reporting on the White House's handling of the terrorist attacks last year on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya. The National Review Online recently claimed that such ties amount to professional incest: "The inbreeding among Obama's court and its press corps is more like one of those 'I'm my own grandpaw' deals," wrote NRO's Mark Steyn in a posting titled "Band of Brothers."
Such insinuations make media types bristle. They take exception to the notion that complicated judgments about the news — often made by others within an organization — have anything to do with personal favoritism or familial relationships. The critics, they say, can't point to any direct evidence that such relationships have affected the amount or tone of their news coverage.
"There is zero evidence, zero, that [Sherwood's relationship] has had any impact on our coverage," says Jeffrey Schneider, ABC News's chief spokesman. Schneider points out that ABC was the first mainstream news organization to report last month that administration officials had altered the White House's talking points about Benghazi 12 times after the attack.
CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair says the Rhodes brothers "have been careful to avoid conflicts of interest for many years," including 12 years during which David Rhodes was a rising star at Fox News Channel and his brother was beginning his career in government (among other jobs, Ben Rhodes worked for Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat, and helped draft the 9/11 Commission report). David Rhodes was vice president of news at Fox during Obama's 2008 campaign and election when his brother became a speechwriter and later a foreign-policy adviser to Obama.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/media-administration-deal-with-conflicts/2013/06/12/e6f98314-ca2e-11e2-8da7-d274bc611a47_story.html
Zorgon 8)
George Knapp
i agree with sarge.zorgon.
all others have a vested interest .at least z can say whatever thevhell he wants without repercussions as well as the rest of us.except on those pesky three occasions a while back.lol.plus we kinda trust each other here.
cant say that for all those backstabbing shill reporters out there.
None. ;D
Andrea Mitchell, NBC anchor, reporter, commentator etc etc, is Alan (Off world) Greenspans squeeze. There Married and I trust them not.
I tend to go with the BBC correspondents. The BBC has always reported accurately and doesn't resort to sensationalism and they cover stories that US media is afraid to touch.
And now I add the Russian Times to my list of trusted sources. I alos like them because they allow and encourage you to share the FULL article for a simple credit link
TRUST - Mark Levin - on most everything, but especially anything related to the Constitution of the United States, and its founding. He is absolutely the best and most direct speaker I have heard on most of the subjects of the current news, political actions, and subjects relative to the degradation of our great country by and through big government.
I am an old guy, and I have never heard of "George Knapp". Is that a local guy somewhere in this country?
Quote from: rdunk on June 14, 2013, 06:16:17 AM
I am an old guy, and I have never heard of "George Knapp". Is that a local guy somewhere in this country?
Rdunk - he is the channel 8 news reporter in Las Vegas who investigated and broke the Bob Lazar story on his station in 1989, in segements each evening in a week long series called 'UFO's The Best Evidence' which ended up getting world wide attention, and blew the lid off Area 51 for the very first time.
I managed to get my hands on a copy of that broadcast shortly after it aired and decided it was worth driving out to take a look for myself.
I am working to get us a clean copy to view on peggy.
p.s. my avatar is a still from the video I took during that trip.
I think Matt Taibbi is an excellent "mainstream" journalist.
You guys ever read any of his articles?
Quote from: zorgon on June 14, 2013, 03:21:17 AM
And now I add the Russian Times to my list of trusted sources. I alos like them because they allow and encourage you to share the FULL article for a simple credit link
RT means "Russia Today", not "Russian Times". :)
I think if you want a global overview it would be RT.
I am british but i would not trust the bbc by ANY stretch. The are an extremley effective propaganda machine for the uk ruling elite.
On the ground you want AFP but you have to find the stories quickly.
I think true investigative reporting is rare these days.
Elvis
Quote from: rdunk on June 14, 2013, 03:24:19 AM
TRUST - Mark Levin - on most everything, but especially anything related to the Constitution of the United States, and its founding. He is absolutely the best and most direct speaker I have heard on most of the subjects of the current news, political actions, and subjects relative to the degradation of our great country by and through big government.
I'm looking at Levin's Wikipedia profile here, and surprisingly, it seems that there are some issues on which he and I would agree. I think it should surely be obvious to any thinking individual, that the American government no longer takes the Constitution seriously at this point, and has not done so for close to 40 years now. Levin's perspective that the country is in a "post-Constitutional phase," is therefore correct.
Where I would strongly disagree, however, is with the assertion that Obama or the people behind him are advocates of Utopian government. Unfortunately, Levin appears to subscribe to the delusion that there is a fundamental difference between the practical agendas persued by Republican and Democratic administrations; when in reality, there is no difference whatsoever.
The only difference between the Republican and Democratic styles of government, and I have said this before, is that Republican administrations are nakedly, openly psychopathic. The Republican party makes no attempt to hide its' fascism whatsoever; and I think we saw this most openly with Bush and Cheney.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK_XWH7Ryd4
As I once wrote in the comments for this video, "All rise for the anthem of the American Republican Party." ;)
On the other hand, while a Democratic administration will be no less authoritarian or tyrannical than the Republicans, the difference lies in the type of image which it tries to portray to the people. The Democratic party employs charisma and deception to falsely convince the electorate that the government is still persuing said electorate's best interests, even when it demonstrably is not.
Obama is a master of this, and of shifting blame. No matter what tyrannical act his government is found guilty of having committed, openly at least, Obama always manages to portray himself as either being entirely innocent, or even opposed to the autocratic action or policy in question. Later, of course, we find out that the exact opposite is true; and that Obama himself will in fact be
more in favour of any measure which confiscates freedom from the people, than virtually anyone else, despite his public claims.
Where I suspect Mr Levin and I would also bitterly disagree, is due to the fact that I am not an advocate of Capitalism; and my opposition to Capitalism comes from direct personal experience. I am not, however, as he might suspect, a Marxist-Leninist Communist, as I am aware that the type of Communism of which he (falsely; I've spoken to ML Communists online, and they emphatically denounce Obama) accuses Obama is a strawman, which was employed specifically for the purpose of publically discrediting Kropotkin's genuine Socialism.
Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were servants of the Eye, and I recognise them as such, and reject their philosophy on that basis.