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Sure—and I'm not excusing Brazile or the DNC. But that wasn't the parent's point. Longtime establishment Democrat operatives acting on behalf of a longtime esta

Sure—and I'm not excusing Brazile or the DNC. But that wasn't the parent's point. Longtime establishment Democrat operatives acting on behalf of a longtime establishment Democrat against a non-Democrat who was constantly talking about his own disconnection from the Democratic establishment is something that I think is bad for the party and unethical. I don't really like the Democratic establishment very much. Having parties full of politicians operate things like debates from a supposedly neutral vantage is silly and shouldn't happen. What does that have to do with a corporate media conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton over the obvious victor Bernie Sanders?

ABCLAW 10y ago
I believe your points were already well addressed, but lets take another stab at this. A number of studies have indicated that media displayed substantial bias during the primaries. That bias was directly in line with Clinton's campaign strategy, as stated in another child to the parent comment. https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidential-primaries/ https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidentia... I'm not sure what else you're looking for. More on the causation front? Studies on the effects of media coverage on candidates in political races have thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere since the election. More on the media bias side? I'm sure you can review the DNC leak as well as other post-election frequency reviews. There's a reason why people were outraged at the media post-election and subsequently why the 'fake news' scapegoat was trotted out as a narrative to salvage the worth of mainstream media's reputation.
- ForrestN 10y ago
  What? From the summary of your link: "Why was Clinton’s coverage substantially more negative than Sanders’, and why did Sanders get so much less coverage than she did?" Did I ever claim the media wasn't biased? Of course the media had an effect on the election, and that effect wasn't neutral. The fact that the media has systemic biases does not imply that major media organizations conspired in favor of a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was actually considered by most to have been negatively impacted in the general election, and according to the link you posted, was covered more negatively than Bernie Sanders. This is a giant mess conflating DNC problems with fundamental realities of news media with an unproven conspiracy theory. I have always been responding to this: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." I promise you, that is not the position of the Shorenstein Center or any other academic research organization focused on journalism.
  - ABCLAW 10y ago
    The primary criticism of media from the Sanders camp was a lack of coverage. Please revisit the Shorenstein Center study on this point. The numbers bear this out, and you're welcome to do further homework on the issue, as well as the importance of variables at play in media coverage. Sentiment analysis is not the only element of reporting coverage that matters. Here's some more analysis which shows the putative internal mechanism for the frequency of media's reporting, which is consistent with the internal stakeholder incentives. The analysis shows that there is a dramatic decoupling in reporting frequency as between Clinton and Sanders. http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-president-2016/ http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-presi... The finding regarding his airtime in comparison to Cruz in the Shorenstein report is damning. So is the search interest correlation decoupling between him and Hillary. Those are hard numbers. Numbers which bear our a narrative which was raised and repeated during the primaries, and then vindicated by numerical analysis afterwards by a number of reputable sources. Additionally, when the DNC leaks did occur, they revealed that Clinton's preferred media outcome did occur, and that the DNC systemically favoured her over Sanders. Put simply, we have the act laid bare by statistical analysis, the relationships between the actors in question mapped out by the leaks, and the incentive for the parties to act all mapped out, yet your position is that there is no evidence whatsoever that something happened.
    - ForrestN 10y ago
      Not at all. You're describing a real problem, but it is in no way a conspiracy, in no way is it new, and in now way is it uniquely related to Hillary Clinton. The media has a problem with "horserace" coverage, which is the subject of your Shorenstein Center study. The problem, which is structural rather than conspiratorial, is that the media is obsessed with covering which candidates are winning and by how much, with projecting who they think will actually win, and then focusing on those candidates. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and creates an enormous barrier to entry for outsider candidates. As the Shorenstein Center study concludes: "The problems associated with press coverage of the 2016 nominating campaign are rooted in the mismatch of journalism values and the structure of the nominating process. There is little question that the nature of the 2016 campaign—Trump’s presence, particularly—brought the mismatch into sharp relief. But the broad tendencies in press coverage of the 2016 coverage are ones that exhibit themselves every four years." The truth is that Sanders was considered by everyone to be a long shot candidate, so he got less coverage. The coverage he did get was much more positive than the coverage of Clinton. They both got radically less coverage than Trump. So, no act laid bare by statistical analysis, just a long-standing bias in favor of covering the most famous candidates with the most celebrity status. The relationships between candidates and reporters is totally public and was in no way revealed by any leaks. It's an obvious part of doing the job of political reporter that only people who had never closely followed a campaign were surprised by, and that was willfully misrepresented by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News as somehow nefarious. Remember, there was no corresponding RNC leak, which would of course show that reporters were talking to politicians there constantly too. There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert with the DNC to influence the outcome of the election in Hillary's favor, only that the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals (to get new information and to win the election, respectively). So, no relationships between actors mapped out. Anyway, if there were a scheme to use frequent mentions to favor a candidate, it's clearly Trump, not Clinton. It's well documented that Trump stories drove the most clicks, which is why news outlets focused so much on him. Was there a massive conspiracy between all the Republicans, including Trump himself, who spoke to reporters every day, clearly tilted the general election in favor of Trump, and had a direct incentive to get a scandal-prone celebrity into office? Most people who follow politics closely know that Clinton has a famously bad relationship with the media and has earned incredibly negative coverage as a result. She's very famous and so she gets covered but there is definitely no giant multi-company conspiracy to support her.
spopejoy 10y ago
I think you're railing too much on the "obvious victor" point, which the OP didn't even say. In fact, given your statement "Longtime establishment Democrat operatives acting on behalf of a longtime establishment Democrat against a non-Democrat", you've established the collusion yourself. The press part is their long-standing and equally unsavory relationship with the [DR]NCs to begin with. Indeed, the burden is on you to show how they ever lifted the tiniest finger to NOT do what we all knew they were up to from the start: coronate Clinton as heir apparent.
- ForrestN 10y ago
  Again, I'm responding to this statement: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." The fact that career democrats feel strongly about the outcome of a democratic primary is not a corporate media conspiracy. Should there be reforms to the Democrats' primary process? Yes. Is that at all relevant to the subject of this part of the thread? No.
  - spopejoy 10y ago
    But you don't challenge the central point. Just because major media collusion with [DR]NC is normal doesn't make it any less galling. In fact the only reason there is any complaint this time around is precisely because Bernie's candidacy was so unexpectedly strong. When Howard Dean was demolished (DNC-orchestrated with the full participation of the press) there wasn't nearly the backlash as he was just getting started. With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
    - ForrestN 10y ago
      There certainly is a kind of mutually entrenching equilibrium between the major political parties and media conglomerates. There are certainly structural factors in terms of how our political and media systems work that arguably disfavored Bernie Sanders. The media believes that establishment candidates are most likely to be elected, and they therefor cover them more than candidates they deem to be less likely, such as Sanders. I think this is a perverse approach that distorts elections, but I have no sense that this is done in bad faith by the thousands of people who make editorial decisions like this every day. I can disagree with the conventions of political coverage in the United States without impugning the motives of an entire industry. Further, the incredibly contingency of all of this means that we can't actually prove such vague cause and effect relationships. We can't know that the media unilaterally crushed Bernie's candidacy. Maybe if the media had covered Bernie more, it would have led to more scrutiny or some kind of gaffe that destroyed his campaign. Maybe if he had gotten one more news story he would have been reading it on his phone, slipped on a banana peel, and broken his neck. I have no idea if more coverage would have made Bernie more popular, or if the "the media is ignoring me!" narrative was actually a key engine of his campaign's growth. Collusion means "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" according to Google. DNC collusion is fair—there are arguments that this is less than nefarious, but I disagree with them. Multi-corporation media conspiracy with the purpose of anointing Hillary over Bernie? Still waiting to see any evidence of that.

ABCLAW 10y ago

I believe your points were already well addressed, but lets take another stab at this. A number of studies have indicated that media displayed substantial bias during the primaries. That bias was directly in line with Clinton's campaign strategy, as stated in another child to the parent comment. https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidential-primaries/ https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidentia... I'm not sure what else you're looking for. More on the causation front? Studies on the effects of media coverage on candidates in political races have thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere since the election. More on the media bias side? I'm sure you can review the DNC leak as well as other post-election frequency reviews. There's a reason why people were outraged at the media post-election and subsequently why the 'fake news' scapegoat was trotted out as a narrative to salvage the worth of mainstream media's reputation.

ForrestN 10y ago
What? From the summary of your link: "Why was Clinton’s coverage substantially more negative than Sanders’, and why did Sanders get so much less coverage than she did?" Did I ever claim the media wasn't biased? Of course the media had an effect on the election, and that effect wasn't neutral. The fact that the media has systemic biases does not imply that major media organizations conspired in favor of a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was actually considered by most to have been negatively impacted in the general election, and according to the link you posted, was covered more negatively than Bernie Sanders. This is a giant mess conflating DNC problems with fundamental realities of news media with an unproven conspiracy theory. I have always been responding to this: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." I promise you, that is not the position of the Shorenstein Center or any other academic research organization focused on journalism.
- ABCLAW 10y ago
  The primary criticism of media from the Sanders camp was a lack of coverage. Please revisit the Shorenstein Center study on this point. The numbers bear this out, and you're welcome to do further homework on the issue, as well as the importance of variables at play in media coverage. Sentiment analysis is not the only element of reporting coverage that matters. Here's some more analysis which shows the putative internal mechanism for the frequency of media's reporting, which is consistent with the internal stakeholder incentives. The analysis shows that there is a dramatic decoupling in reporting frequency as between Clinton and Sanders. http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-president-2016/ http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-presi... The finding regarding his airtime in comparison to Cruz in the Shorenstein report is damning. So is the search interest correlation decoupling between him and Hillary. Those are hard numbers. Numbers which bear our a narrative which was raised and repeated during the primaries, and then vindicated by numerical analysis afterwards by a number of reputable sources. Additionally, when the DNC leaks did occur, they revealed that Clinton's preferred media outcome did occur, and that the DNC systemically favoured her over Sanders. Put simply, we have the act laid bare by statistical analysis, the relationships between the actors in question mapped out by the leaks, and the incentive for the parties to act all mapped out, yet your position is that there is no evidence whatsoever that something happened.
  - ForrestN 10y ago
    Not at all. You're describing a real problem, but it is in no way a conspiracy, in no way is it new, and in now way is it uniquely related to Hillary Clinton. The media has a problem with "horserace" coverage, which is the subject of your Shorenstein Center study. The problem, which is structural rather than conspiratorial, is that the media is obsessed with covering which candidates are winning and by how much, with projecting who they think will actually win, and then focusing on those candidates. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and creates an enormous barrier to entry for outsider candidates. As the Shorenstein Center study concludes: "The problems associated with press coverage of the 2016 nominating campaign are rooted in the mismatch of journalism values and the structure of the nominating process. There is little question that the nature of the 2016 campaign—Trump’s presence, particularly—brought the mismatch into sharp relief. But the broad tendencies in press coverage of the 2016 coverage are ones that exhibit themselves every four years." The truth is that Sanders was considered by everyone to be a long shot candidate, so he got less coverage. The coverage he did get was much more positive than the coverage of Clinton. They both got radically less coverage than Trump. So, no act laid bare by statistical analysis, just a long-standing bias in favor of covering the most famous candidates with the most celebrity status. The relationships between candidates and reporters is totally public and was in no way revealed by any leaks. It's an obvious part of doing the job of political reporter that only people who had never closely followed a campaign were surprised by, and that was willfully misrepresented by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News as somehow nefarious. Remember, there was no corresponding RNC leak, which would of course show that reporters were talking to politicians there constantly too. There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert with the DNC to influence the outcome of the election in Hillary's favor, only that the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals (to get new information and to win the election, respectively). So, no relationships between actors mapped out. Anyway, if there were a scheme to use frequent mentions to favor a candidate, it's clearly Trump, not Clinton. It's well documented that Trump stories drove the most clicks, which is why news outlets focused so much on him. Was there a massive conspiracy between all the Republicans, including Trump himself, who spoke to reporters every day, clearly tilted the general election in favor of Trump, and had a direct incentive to get a scandal-prone celebrity into office? Most people who follow politics closely know that Clinton has a famously bad relationship with the media and has earned incredibly negative coverage as a result. She's very famous and so she gets covered but there is definitely no giant multi-company conspiracy to support her.

spopejoy 10y ago

I think you're railing too much on the "obvious victor" point, which the OP didn't even say. In fact, given your statement "Longtime establishment Democrat operatives acting on behalf of a longtime establishment Democrat against a non-Democrat", you've established the collusion yourself. The press part is their long-standing and equally unsavory relationship with the [DR]NCs to begin with. Indeed, the burden is on you to show how they ever lifted the tiniest finger to NOT do what we all knew they were up to from the start: coronate Clinton as heir apparent.

ForrestN 10y ago
Again, I'm responding to this statement: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." The fact that career democrats feel strongly about the outcome of a democratic primary is not a corporate media conspiracy. Should there be reforms to the Democrats' primary process? Yes. Is that at all relevant to the subject of this part of the thread? No.
- spopejoy 10y ago
  But you don't challenge the central point. Just because major media collusion with [DR]NC is normal doesn't make it any less galling. In fact the only reason there is any complaint this time around is precisely because Bernie's candidacy was so unexpectedly strong. When Howard Dean was demolished (DNC-orchestrated with the full participation of the press) there wasn't nearly the backlash as he was just getting started. With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
  - ForrestN 10y ago
    There certainly is a kind of mutually entrenching equilibrium between the major political parties and media conglomerates. There are certainly structural factors in terms of how our political and media systems work that arguably disfavored Bernie Sanders. The media believes that establishment candidates are most likely to be elected, and they therefor cover them more than candidates they deem to be less likely, such as Sanders. I think this is a perverse approach that distorts elections, but I have no sense that this is done in bad faith by the thousands of people who make editorial decisions like this every day. I can disagree with the conventions of political coverage in the United States without impugning the motives of an entire industry. Further, the incredibly contingency of all of this means that we can't actually prove such vague cause and effect relationships. We can't know that the media unilaterally crushed Bernie's candidacy. Maybe if the media had covered Bernie more, it would have led to more scrutiny or some kind of gaffe that destroyed his campaign. Maybe if he had gotten one more news story he would have been reading it on his phone, slipped on a banana peel, and broken his neck. I have no idea if more coverage would have made Bernie more popular, or if the "the media is ignoring me!" narrative was actually a key engine of his campaign's growth. Collusion means "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" according to Google. DNC collusion is fair—there are arguments that this is less than nefarious, but I disagree with them. Multi-corporation media conspiracy with the purpose of anointing Hillary over Bernie? Still waiting to see any evidence of that.