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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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traditionally sympathetic media outlets

CNN had some ownership/leadership changes in 2022 which included an explicitly stated goal of being more neutral. Whether they're a right-wing media outlet now depends on who you ask, but they're actively trying to shed their image as a pro-Democratic-Party one.

Hope and gullibility spring eternal.

Licht was fired as CNN's president and CEO in June 2023, after an article in The Atlantic revealed that employees had become unhappy with him over actions taken during his tenure.

So, that went well. Whether Zaslaw is still pushing for neutrality or not is unclear to me, but I'll grant that there's grounds to believe CNN is no longer a sympathetic media outlet.

In any case, here's the New York Times and the Washington Post. A brief Google search turned up similar anxiety across NPR, NBC, CBS, the AP, ABC, Fox (of course)... Even MSNBC started running interference in early January, and much like one can infer the rough outline of an object from the shadow it casts, here too we can infer the immigration-shaped issue from the article's calculated absence of context. Setting aside sympathies, record-breaking illegal immigration figures were inarguably headline news in December, and that's not a good look for Biden.

My cynical take on that is, did the NYT get concerned about the issue after the migrants started turning up in New York and having to be sheltered in tent cities there? It's easy to finger-wag at the terrible Texans when your city is not the one dealing with 5,000 a day coming in, but when they start doing that to the City Of Immigrants, oh my now what is the President doing about this?

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