[syshum]

>>But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting?

I think this is your bias showing if you believe the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ are not just a manipulative in their reporting as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Do they outright lie, of course not, but they omit things, they choose not to run some stories that do not fit their narrative, they choose to "expose" the most extreme version of the story.

The Current Gun Rights debate highlights this nicely for all of them.

[AnimalMuppet]

I think CNN was clearly corrupt in the last election cycle. That's pretty well documented (especially helping Hillary against Bernie). It wasn't just "manipulative in their reporting". It was out-and-out helping a campaign win.

Are the NYT, WP, and WSJ biased? Sure. Are they corrupt in the sense that CNN was? I haven't seen evidence of it.

[colordrops]

If anything the Washington Post was worse than CNN. They ran 16 anti-Bernie stories in 16 hours [1]. Their outright complete support of Hillary was very obvious.

[1] https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

NY Times often used spurious polling and statistics to push Hillary. They messaged that Hillary was in the lead before primaries even began based on predicted super delegate numbers. They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong. They were trying to manufacture consent.

[ceejayoz]

> They messaged that Hillary was in the lead before primaries even began based on predicted super delegate numbers.

Which was true.

> They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong.

Even election day doesn't necessarily prove that "wrong". 90% chance of Hillary winning means a 10% chance of Trump winning. If I draw a red ace of clubs out of a deck of cards, I don't go "that's statistically unlikely, fake news!"

It appears that 538's model was better, in hindsight, as he appears to have been correct to give more credence to the chances of a multi-state polling miss. It's not clear the NYT's model was necessarily wrong, through.

[colordrops]

> Which was true.

Except that it was not. Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

You seem to be defending the news coverage. Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?

[untog]

> Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

The superdelegates were always going to vote for Hillary. Everyone involved, Bernie included, knew this. You might say that's very unfair and I'd agree with you, but surely the problem here is the Democratic party's delegate system? It seems very odd to blame the media when they were simply reporting the accurate facts on the ground. Should they also refrain from reporting polling numbers? After all, those too can change in time.

[colordrops]

If the media didn't report the super delegates as in the bag, and didn't surreptitiously do everything they could to bias their coverage toward Hillary, and Bernie won the primaries in a landslide, do you really think the super delegates would still cast their votes for Hillary? Do you not see the flaw in this logic?

[ceejayoz]

> Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

So? We consider "x is likely to happen" to be legitimate things to cover everywhere else. We knew which way the superdelegates were likely to break, just as we often know which way the Supreme Court is likely to rule.

> Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?

Lacking information on the max negative-per-day re: Trump and Hillary, and lacking information on the max overall posts in a day, I have no useful information to evaluate that one. I'd suspect both Trump and Hillary have had more than 16 negative WaPo headlines in a day.

[colordrops]

Media coverage is pretty much the only input that most people have when making a decision on who to vote for. It's a well known phenomenon that people vote for winners. Portraying someone as a winner will heavily bias the population to vote for them. It would be complete denial of reality or intellectually dishonest to claim that media doesn't heavily influence the vote. Why else would billions be spent on media campaigns?

And I can tell you that I recognized the anti-Bernie coverage before I ever saw that FAIR post. I specifically looked for negative Hillary coverage on the WP around that time and was hard pressed to find more than one slightly negative article every other day. I eventually googled on WP being slanted against Bernie and found that FAIR article.