Fact check: True. When you’re not being soulless monsters, you’re partisan hacks.
But the American Press Institute goes to bat for the Washington Post over the Merry Impeachmass tweet.
Even though she deleted the tweet, the castigation didn’t die down, and Trump supporters picked up the story and ran with it as part of an effort to show that members of “the media” are really happy about the impeachment and therefore biased.
Speaking to CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter after the episode, Post Editor Marty Baron said it was unfortunate that the tweet was distorted by people who portrayed it as reporters celebrating the impeachment.
“The reporter who sent out that tweet, and I think was an ill-considered tweet, but what they were doing is that they were celebrating being able to go off the clock after a long day of covering impeachment,” he told Stelter.
Except they weren’t celebrating the end of ‘impeachmass’, but impeach itself.
Since Jeff Bezos’ social justice rag has put its mission of destroying President Trump up on its masthead, there’s every reason to believe that Baron’s boys and girls meant exactly that. There would have been nothing unusual about such a tweet in the mass of lefty celebrations.
Can anyone at API seriously argue that the Washington Post isn’t fighting for impeachment or celebrating it?
The report also talks about how behavior in the field is important. We recount a story told by longtime Florida public radio editor, Teresa Frontado, who said that after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last year, two of her reporters witnessed journalists from other organizations high-fiving one another after they secured interviews with some of the surviving students.
This kind of behavior, Frontado said, is a sure way to feed the stereotype of the media as disconnected from everyday citizens and willing to abandon good judgment for a good story. Frontado said the station’s editors used the episode as part of a newsroom discussion about what the staff learned from Parkland and how to better cover traumatic events.
Journalists distance themselves emotionally from difficult stories out of self-preservation, to cover the worst of humanity with detachment and objectivity.
Please. Spare us this nonsense.
Those high fives weren’t about covering the worst of humanity, but scoring career goals that have a narrative component. These were activists waging war on the Second Amendment without caring in the least about those who were murdered in Parkland.
The media oscillates between soulless hackery and partisan hackery.
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