Friday, December 2, 2016

Making Money from Lies

How to handle liars?

This is the problem facing US news media this year and in the coming four years.

If someone such as dt speaks outright lies in an interview televised live, do you turn off the camera?

Do you follow with fact-checking to try to counteract the effect of the lies?

The hairline victory by dt in November was built on lies and on promises the candidate did not intend to keep.

On Wednesday evening, journalists and politicians gathered for "what is a typically staid postelection conference at Harvard," according to New York Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/business/media/trump-cnns-coverage-biased-presidential-candidates-aides-say.html

Much anger was directed at CNN president Jeffrey A. Zucker for making about $1 billion in profit this year, much of it from election coverage.

"At what point do you say you cannot come on our air anymore because you have told too many lies?" demanded Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post.

"You showered hours upon hours of unfiltered, unscrutinized coverage of Trump!" shouted a top advisor to Marco Rubio.  

As Zucker noted, lies sell.  Showing dt day after day during the primaries lifted CNN's ratings.

The panel's moderator Sasha Issenberg quipped, let's move on "to a less contentious subject, fake news."

US government is veering off the charts in many ways as a result of this election.  Just one of those ways is having a president who lies freely, often in impulsive tweets.

May God save us, and may the Fourth Estate step up to the task and expose the lies.

Unfortunately, journalists are fewer in number and finding it harder to land paid jobs as print journalism shrinks and online media, websites, and bloggers run rampant, often with facts unchecked.

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