“But her emails.” Following the 2016 presidential election, those words entered American media lore as shorthand for one of the most grievous errors made by the press in its coverage of the campaign: that it overhyped Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to balance out Donald Trump’s more serious indiscretions and dodge accusations of partisanship. As 2020 loomed, media-watchers feared a repeat performance. In September, when we first learned that Trump had asked the president of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, such fears started to crystallize—with “Hunter Biden had ties to a dodgy Ukrainian gas company while his dad oversaw Ukraine policy” playing the “emails” role. James Fallows fretted, in a widely shared essay in The Atlantic, that Hunter was “Patient Zero of the next false-equivalence epidemic.” Writing for The Bulwark, Tim Miller called the Bidens storyline a “nontroversy” that the media would nonetheless lap up. Some of the early coverage seemed to prove their points. Fast forward four months, and a full-blown crisis of false equivalence has not materialized—at least, not yet. Yesterday—as Pam Bondi, a member of the defense team in Trump’s impeachment trial, laced into the Bidens on the Senate floor—the press faced a fresh test of that proposition. Its coverage was not perfect. (Some toplines relayed Bondi’s claims of corruption without noting that they’ve been debunked; others used insufficiently authoritative framing—“Trump says x, Biden says y”—to... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-01-28 13:08:46 UTC ]
Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Mon, 14/02/2011 - 17:21 HarperCollins Childrens Books publishing director Helen Mackenzie Smith has bought her first books since joining the publisher from Random House earlier this year. She bought four books by picture author and illustrator Rachel... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Benedicte Page Publication Date: Fri, 11/02/2011 - 08:28 An open letter to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and culture minister Ed Vaizey calling for a halt to library closures after the success of last weekend's protests has been signed by high-profile authors including Sarah... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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