Friday, September 18, 2015

Mainstream Media Flunks Honesty in Carly Fiorina Coverage. Can't Trust them Anymore.


Paper of Record setting record for failing the public.

Daily Kos joins me in condemning the press for giving Carly Fiorina a pass on her false representations of the monstrously deceptive, heavily edited, fraudulent videos foisted on the American public by the Center for Medical Progress, which is, essentially, a bogus group created to add legitimacy to an otherwise corrupt support of the anti-abortion crowd.

The worst two zingers:
According to CNN, this fabrication was "true but misleading." Except for the part where it was false. The New York Times has a special take on it as well, headlined Carly Fiorina Said to Exaggerate Content of Planned Parenthood Video. Said to? And check out how the article kicks off:
Carly Fiorina set off some fact-check alarm bells on Wednesday when she dared Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama to watch undercover Planned Parenthood videos that show dead fetuses. While the authenticity of the videos remains a subject of debate, Mrs. Fiorina appears to have exaggerated their contents.
As Hunter of Daily Kos points out, that second sentence is a true howler, a riot if it weren't such a maddening bit of dissembling on NYTimes' part. The entire set of CMP videos have been repeatedly investigated and repeatedly debunked. The contents that Fiorina "appears to have exaggerated" was unidentified stock footage that doesn't resemble her description of it. It clearly wasn't taken at a Planned Parenthood because if it had been, the CMP would have turned triple cartwheels making sure everyone knew it.

Karen Tumulty of WaPo penned a tribute to Fiorina's post-debate status with a headline in the same vein as NYTimes' coverage, reading "For Carly Fiorina, capitalizing on post-debate buzz brings new tests." The new tests?
One of Fiorina’s gifts is her quickness and agility when the spotlight is on her. But with Fiorina now seen as a viable contender for her party’s nomination, her comments will be examined more closely.
For instance, one crowd-pleaser at Wednesday’s GOP debate also came under fire Thursday as inaccurate.
She had graphically described watching a video of a fetus with a beating heartbeat have its brain removed at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and challenged Democrats to have the courage to watch it.
“Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” Fiorina said.
In fact, no such footage has surfaced in the controversy over secretly recorded videos by the antiabortion group called the Center for Medical Progress.
The video to which Fiorina referred has an interview with a biotechnology technician, whose company partnered with Planned Parenthood, describing such a scene as images of a fetus are shown.
This section, discussing the likelihood of Fiorina's being "examined more closely," came late in a rather lengthy article. If there's any good take-away from the coverage of Fiorina in the mainstream press it's that commenters on the articles almost uniformly detest Fiorina. Seriously. Why would that be?

Persona? One of contempt. People notice. So did Trump.

Don't want to comment on her looks, except that contemptuous superciliousness is not attractive. Might have something to do with people's negative take on her. (Not counting the press, because they are narrative-driven, and they like the Fiorina-rips-Trump-a-new-one meme.)


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