Tag Archives: Eric Boehlert

Eric Boehlert’s Final Press Run

Posted on by under Free Press Issues, History, Political commentary, Social commentary

When I received this newsletter by Eric Boehlert, founder of Press Run on Monday, I set it aside, knowing I wanted to use it in a blog post, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.  Yesterday I learned that on Monday, the same day this article was published, Eric Boehlert was hit and killed by a train while riding his bicycle.  That news took my breath.  Eric Boehlert has done a fine job of holding the media accountable, holding their feet to the fire, and he will be sorely missed by those of us who read and appreciated his perspective.

Why is the press rooting against Biden?

Burying great news

Eric Boehlert, 4 April 2022

Like clockwork, the first Friday of the month brought another blockbuster jobs report. The U.S. economy under President Joe Biden added another 400,000-plus new jobs in March, it was announced last week.

Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.

Yet the press shrugs off the good news, determined to keep Biden pinned down. “The reality is that one strong jobs report does not snap the administration out of its current circumstances,” Politico stressed Friday afternoon. How about 11 straight strong job reports, would that do the trick? Because the U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.  

The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)

Just look at the relentlessly dour economic coverage. For the press, inflation remains the dominant, bad-news-for-Dems economic story. Even on Friday, the day the stellar jobs report was released, “inflation” was mentioned on cable news nearly as often as “jobs,” according to TVeyes.com.

Axios contorted itself by claiming Biden’s promise to add “millions” of new jobs (which he’s already accomplished), was being threatened because there aren’t enough workers, because so few people are out of work— or something.

The home-run report itself was often depicted as a mixed bag. These were some of the glass-half-empty headlines that appeared in the wake of the latest runaway numbers:

Totally normal journalism, right? The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news.

Note that the above headlines about the sour mood prevailing despite the great jobs, and how uncertainty looms, came from the Post, the same outlet that slotted the March jobs report into 87th placed on its website on Friday.

That afternoon readers on the daily’s homepage had to scroll down 87 headlines before they saw the first reference to the great economic news. Among the headlines that ran higher on the Post site that afternoon were, “What’s The Best Way to Share My Old Home Videos?” and “The Duke-North Carolina Rivalry, By the Numbers.”

On-air, CNN also downplayed the jobs report, according to Dean Baker, senior economist for Center for Economic and Policy Research. “CNN’s coverage of the report quickly turned to inflation,” he wrote. “In its more general coverage of the economy, the jobs report — which tells us about the employment and earnings situation for more than 160 million people — was barely a blip.”  

Sunday’s “Meet the Press” round table featured two segments with assembled pundits. One focused on how immigration might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms, the other on how Trump might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms. As usual, Biden’s historic economic record was ignored.

That’s why, according to a recent poll, 37 percent of Americans think the economy lost jobs over the last year, when it’s gained 7 million. (Just 28 percent of people know jobs were up.)

Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.

Biden is facing not just one organized opposition in the form of the GOP, but another in the form of the Beltway press corps.

Last week, they hit Biden with 14 separate questions at a press briefing over the supposed “gaffe” he made, expressing his moral outrage over the mass killings Russian President Vladimir Putn has unleashed in Ukraine. So focused on trying to trip up Biden, the press didn’t ask a single question about the state of the Ukraine war.  

And remember all winter how the press treated Covid as the most important “crisis” Biden faced and hung the pandemic around his neck? Today, the topic has vanished, the press has given the White House no credit for steering the country back to normalcy, and instead has latched onto gas prices as being a defining issue under Biden. The buried Covid coverage represents a telling example of how an issue that the press itself claimed would define the Biden administration gets translated into no news when it turns towards positive territory.

The Beltway press needs to take its thumb off the Biden scale.

R.I.P. Mr. Boehlert … you will be sorely missed.

Did The Press Let Us Down? Yes.

Posted on by under Environmental Issues, Free Press Issues, Global Issues, Social commentary

I am a staunch supporter of the rights of the free press, for without a free press, we are subject to being held hostage by the lies and cruelty of a dictatorship.  However, in exchange for We the People supporting the free press, we have a right to expect them to give us facts, not fiction.  We have a right to expect that they will provide us with all the facts, not just the ones that sensationalize a story and bring them readers, aka profit.  Sure, there are the likes of Fox ‘News’ and Newsmax that exist for the sole purpose of providing right-wing conspiracy theories, but I’m talking about the legitimate press, what some refer to as the mainstream media.  Over the past decade, the press has let us down numerous times in a number of ways, but today’s example is one that could cost lives, as Eric Boehlert of Press Run tells us …

How the media botched the J&J vaccine “pause” story

Headlines matter

Eric Boehlert

Concerned about six rare and severe blood clot reactions out of nearly seven million Americans who have received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, the CDC and the FDA on Tuesday announced a sweeping pause of the immunization in order to investigate the handful of cases.

The J&J vaccine, with its single-dose regimen, currently represents less than five percent of the 100 million-plus vaccines that have been administered this year. The government has more than enough Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to hit the goal of 200 million shots by the end of the month, according to the White House.

Unfortunately for Tuesday’s J&J breaking news, crucial context was missing from most of the headlines. Instead of stressing that less than one in a million J&J shots had produced the troubling blood clot reaction, the press focused on “concerns” surrounding the “halt,”  and how the move “threatens to slow U.S. pandemic progress”:

  • “Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Halt Across Country After Rare Clotting Cases Emerge” (New York Times)
  • “CDC and FDA Recommend US Pause Use of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 Vaccine Over Blood Clot Concerns” (CNN)
  • “US Recommends ‘Pause’ For J&J Vaccine Over Clot Reports” (Associated Press)
  • “Pause of J&J Vaccine Threatens to Slow U.S. Pandemic Progress Amid Rising Caseload” (Washington Post)
  • “Stocks Wobble After J&J Vaccine Halted, Inflation Uptick” (Wall Street Journal)
  • “US Calls For Pause in Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Over Blood Clot Concerns” (ABC News)
  • “U.S. Recommends Pausing Use Of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Over Blood Clot Concerns” (NPR)

It would have been such a simple fix to include “six cases” in each of those headlines, or “extremely rare” in order to give the story crucial, factual context. It’s especially important to provide that full meaning during a public health crisis. Reading those headlines, people likely assumed there were hundreds if not thousands of cases that prompted the vaccine “pause.”

The key omission played into the hands of conservatives who work hard to raise doubts about the virus shots.

It’s true that news consumers who dug into the reports discovered how rare the vaccine-related blood clots were. But those consumers were likely in the minority. According to a  a 2016 study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, nearly 60 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. “People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper,” the chief researcher announced.

The J&J news also attracted lots of media attention speculating whether the halt would cause more people to not want to get vaccinated.

It was a bit ironic Tuesday to watch reporters repeatedly press White House officials at the daily media briefing about whether the J&J pause will increase vaccine hesitancy, while never addressing the role the press might play in that phenomenon. By repeatedly failing to put the J&J pause in proper context, specifically with headlines, news outlets bear some of the responsibility this week in pushing alarmist narratives that don’t match the facts.

The CDC and FDA move comes at a time when the conservative media have raised doubts about the vaccines and Republican voters, and white evangelicals in particular, have expressed disdain for getting vaccinated as the country tries to achieve herd immunity in order to return to normalcy. For that to happen, anywhere 75% to 85% of the total population — including children, who are not currently getting the shots — need to be vaccinated.

Nationally, a recent Marist poll in partnership with NPR and PBS found 49% of Republican men said they would not take the vaccine. In Texas, 61 % of white Republicans say they’ll decline. In one county in Alabama, just seven percent of the eligible population has opted to get vaccinated. (More than 90% of county voters backed Trump last year.) And in North Carolina, a coastal county will stop administering vaccines at the end of the month because so few residents are scheduling appointments for the shot.

On Tuesday, the J&J announcement was treated as the biggest Covid news in weeks. The halt came at a time when there had been endless encouraging news about the vaccine rollout during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Is it possible the bad-news angle appealed to the press? A recent study found that the U.S. press prefers to lean into bad Covid news:

The [pandemic] coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity.”

The important J&J pause story was one that cried out for full context in all aspects of the coverage, including the all-important headlines. Instead, the press bungled the assignment.

The Press Got It WRONG!

Posted on by under Election 2020, Free Press Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary

I fully support a free press, for without that, this nation cannot survive as a democratic republic.  However, in exchange for our support of the freedom of the press, we have a right to expect accurate and comprehensive reporting.  In this, we have been failed.  Rather than call a spade a ‘bloody shovel’, as my UK friend Mary once told me, they are whitewashing the GOP and pretending that there is still a party that actually cares about this nation and its people.

A daily newsletter I receive, Press Run written by Eric Boehlert, a respected journalist and published author, tells of the media’s latest lie – that the GOP has found their conscience.  It hasn’t.  Apparently, if violence and the threat of their own deaths wasn’t enough, then nothing will be.

Memo to media: the GOP’s Trump “reckoning” is never coming

Chasing unicorns

eric-boehlertEric Boehlert

In a move that should have surprised nobody, yet seemed to catch the D.C. press off guard, the Republican Party rallied to Trump’s defense this week, voting overwhelmingly in favor of shutting down an impeachment trial before it even begins in the U.S. Senate.

Casting aside the fact that he incited a murderous mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol, 45 Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), voted to give a remorseless Trump a pass. The vote came in the wake of news that, during the final days of his presidency, Trump secretly plotted to fire the U.S. Attorney General in order to force Georgia officials to overturn the state’s election results, which would have ignited the country’s gravest Constitutional crisis in a century.  

Confirmed: There is no looming GOP “reckoning” over Trump, and there will never will be, no matter how many times naïve news outlets suggest otherwise.

For five years, the press has gotten this story wrong. Why? Today’s Republican Party represents an unwieldy challenge for news outlets. It spent the winter wantonly trying to invalidate election results, while simultaneously endangering the masses during a public healthy crisis by deliberately misinforming Americans about the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also taken no disciplinary action against a new Congresswoman who previously supported the killing of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Yet the press remains committed to portraying the GOP as a mainstream, center-right entity. That’s why it keeps botching the “reckoning” story — reporters assume there is a Republican breaking point with Trump and the politics of hate and revenge he represents. But there never is.

The post-insurrection mob headlines in early January were explicit. And they were all wrong: 

“Republicans Splinter Over Whether to Make a Full Break From Trump” (New York Times)

  • “A GOP Reckoning After Turning Blind Eye to Trump” (Associated Press)
  • “Insurrection Marks Moment of Reckoning for Republicans” (US News)
  • “The day Trump broke the GOP” (Politico)
  • ” GOP Faces Trump Reckoning” (NPR)
  • “Southern California Republicans face reckoning after insurrection in D.C.” (Orange County Register)

If one of our two major political parties doesn’t care that Trump incited a mob by attacking free and fair elections for months, if the GOP doesn’t want to address the fact that extreme and violent domestic forces rallied to Trump’s side and set out, in theory, to kill members of Congress, then the press should report the truth and stop pushing this myth about a looming “reckoning.”

Instead, the Beltway press badly misread the insurrection story and assumed so-called responsible members of the GOP would do the right thing. The height of that purposeful naïveté came when nameless McConnell aides started calling reporters two weeks ago and telling them that McConnell maybe/kinda supported impeachment. Convinced that the mythical “reckoning” had arrived, journalists wildly overplayed the story.

“There’s a better than 50-50 chance that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would vote to convict President Trump in an impeachment trial,” Axios excitedly reported. “Rep. Liz Cheney’s support for impeachment could open the floodgates for other Republicans,” insisted CBS’s Norah O’Donnell. The New York Times agreed, claiming Cheney’s move was, “a sign that the dam could be breaking against Mr. Trump in a party that has long been unfailingly loyal to him.” Adding, “Party leaders were racing to distance themselves from a president many of them now regard as a political and constitutional threat.” The newspaper was sure the “deeply divided” GOP was “close to a breaking point,” in the wake of the murderous mob.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

A Fox News headline announced, “McConnell Furious With President, Supports Move to Initiate Impeachment Proceedings.” And from CNN: “Many Republican senators are staying quiet about whether they’ll back conviction — a sign that they, too, could support conviction in an effort to rid Trump from their party.”

Wait, what? By saying nothing about impeachment Republicans were signaling they might support impeachment? What a strange tealeaf-reading exercise from journalists who were anxious to create a storyline about a rebellious wing of the Republican Party standing up to Trump. The whole thing was a mirage.

The press has been making this mistake for years, anxiously portraying Republicans as being deeply concerned over Trump’s reckless and dangerous behavior. Last summer, the Times announced GOP members were  “despairing” over Trump. “The result is a quiet but widening breach between Mr. Trump and leading figures in his party,” the newspaper insisted.  The breach though, was only visible to members of the press.

This kind of coverage has been predictably wrong throughout the Trump era because journalists have been projecting a rational thought process onto the Republican Party, and especially after he incited a deadly mob, leading journalists to think, ‘Of course they’ll punish Trump, of course he’ll be forced to pay a price, right?’

Not by this radical GOP. It was never a realistic option. The press needs to cover today’s GOP for what it actually is — fringe and erratic — and not the mainstream version they want it to be.

Here we go again

Posted on by under Election 2020, Free Press Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

In 2016, the media inadvertently helped Donald Trump by being so fascinated over his unlikely candidacy that they gave him almost unlimited FREE coverage. And today, our beloved “mainstream” media are doing something similar. Please read Jeff’s post, for this is something that I had not considered, and I bet many of you haven’t either, but we need to be aware. Many thanks, dear Jeff, for this post!

On The Fence Voters

It’s happening folks. Once again, our media is dropping the ball. If you remember, about 11 years ago, not long after the inauguration of the first African-American president, a so-called ‘grassroots’ movement began that called itself the Tea Party. Supposedly, this group was immensely upset at what they saw as an out of control socialist government. We now know, of course, that the grassroots part of this equation was bogus. Much of the movement was financed and promoted by right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers and Fox News (Trump TV).

And now with most of the country shutdown trying to contain the Covid-19 pandemic, another so-called grassroots movement seems to be gathering steam. But is it really?

Media expert Eric Boehlert at PressRun has another take. When it comes to exposing media hypocrisy, nobody does it better than Eric. Here’s his take on what looks increasingly like what we saw…

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The Media Drops The Ball-Again

Posted on by under Free Press Issues, Global Issues, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Our friend Jeff introduces us to Eric Boehlert, a journalist who calls a spade a spade, unlike far too many today! Take a minute to read and ponder, if you will. Thanks Jeff!

On The Fence Voters

For over three years now, our national media continues to try and normalize this president. Nobody points this out better than media critic Eric Boehlert. You’ve maybe seen Eric on MSNBC, as he’s regularly on AM Joy on most weekends. For years he wrote for Media Matters, a progressive non-profit organization that specializes in monitoring and analyzing conservative media lies and misinformation. In addition, he has a regular segment on progressive talk-show host Stephanie Miller every Monday on SiriusXM Channel 127. Now, he has his new website: Press Run. I hope you enjoy Eric’s take. As usual, he’s spot on. There are links below if you’d like to subscribe to his site. It’s free.

How Ap, NPR, and NYT help whitewash Trump’s virus madness

Normalizing carries a high price

By Eric Boehlert

After three years we start to lose the words and the right language to describe Trump’s often demented…

View original post 868 more words