… As Americans process a dizzying week of damning revelations about the president — his firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey; his disclosure of highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians; and his plea to Mr. Comey to drop the bureau’s investigation of his fired national security adviser, Michael […] Read more »
60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll: The news media
Welcome to the 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll for May 2017. There will always be muckrakers, they’ve been around since Adams vs. Jefferson in 1796 and there are plenty at play today. In simpler times, reporters turned a blind eye to things like FDR’s polio and JFK’s dalliances but that ship […] Read more »
21st-century propaganda: A guide to interpreting and confronting the dark arts of persuasion
… The belief, or rather hope, that humankind is ultimately rational has gripped Western politics at least since Descartes, and inspired such 19th-century optimists as Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. “Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe,” Jefferson famously wrote. But in […] Read more »
Americans’ Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Partisan Lines
Democrats and Republicans, who already tend to place their trust in different news sources and rely on different outlets for political news, now disagree more than ever on a fundamental issue of the news media’s role in society: whether news organizations’ criticism of political leaders primarily keeps them from doing […] Read more »
The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used […] Read more »
At least half of Americans think Trump and the media are ‘regularly’ wrong
The media says President Trump makes claims that aren’t true. Trump says the media produces fake news. And in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, at least half of Americans say both Trump and the media “regularly” disseminate false information. Nobody looks good in this survey. CONT. Callum Borchers, Washington […] Read more »