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by excursionist 2383 days ago
I see this happening pretty much every day for political news. I don't keep track of a list, but here is a recent example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/politics/bernie-sander...

> Mr. Uygur, a longtime supporter of Mr. Sanders, has also disparaged former President Barack Obama on his show, argued that bestiality should be legal and hosted white supremacist figures, including David Duke. In one clip that circulated on Twitter, Mr. Duke ends an interview by saying, “I am not, what you call a racist,” to which Mr. Uygur replies sarcastically, “No, of course not.”

They added the word 'sarcastically' and also added this after:

> Mr. Uygur called the clip a “complete smear” that had been taken out of context from a combative one-hour interview in which he pushed back on Mr. Duke.

In reality, NYT published a smear about Cenk Uygur, claiming he was supporting and agreeing with this white supremacist David Duke. This was a straight up lie, since Cenk spent the entire interview criticizing and arguing with David Duke, not agreeing with him at all. This caused an outrage among Cenk's supporters, and NYT quietly updated their article so that now it says almost the opposite of the original! Also, note that the smear was published after Cenk decided to run for Congress and the reporter knew that the clip used to support the 'Cenk agrees with David Duke' smear was out of context. [1]

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/ny-times-corrects-report-on-ce...

1 comments

The Cenk Uygur situation is part of a broader trend I observe where traditional media outlets have a highly negative bias, to the point that it often ventures into the realm of fabrication, towards news and people in new media. News distributed via YouTube and social media and similar are an existential threat to the traditional news publications, and the thus there exists a fundamental conflict of interest when the latter covers the former.