Gawker Whines About CNBC Criticism; Attacking Media ‘the Most Popular Refuge of the Scoundrel’

[rangerrebew]

Gawker Whines About CNBC Criticism; Attacking Media ‘the Most Popular Refuge of the Scoundrel’
By Curtis Houck | October 29, 2015 | 10:58 PM EDT
 

As one of the few liberal outlets willing to stand up for CNBC and its three moderators after Wednesday’s atrocious Republican presidential debate, Gawker and writer Hamilton Nolan tried on Thursday to take conservatives to task by lamenting that exposing the liberal media “is the most popular refuge of the scoundrel” showing that the GOP field is neither “honest” nor “wise.”

With the post entitled “f the media loses, so do you,” Nolan started attacking from the first sentence anyone who questions the news media: “After patriotism and religion, “attacking the media” is the most popular refuge of the scoundrel.”

Nolan then took aim at Ronald Reagan’s influence and the denouncement of the media as the two things that all candidates agreed on before demanding readers consider “the intrinsic absurdity of the fact that the Republican candidates chose to launch their attack on the media on the night that the debate was held on CNBC.”

This is because, in his mind, the network is supposedly huge fans of Republicans:

    The channel of angry, wealthy white males ranting about the stock market. The channel, in other words, that most accurately represents the Republican Party. Though the moderators last night may have fumbled a couple of times, they did succeed in asking questions such as: Why is your tax plan based on fantasy? Why do the numbers of your plan not add up? How do you plan to finance the government while also slashing all of the money that the government takes in?

Nolan made only a few critiques of the CNBC moderators, declaring that their errors “were mostly stylistic, not substantive.”

Bashing the candidates as dishonest and unwise, Nolan chided them for being “skilled in political tactics—self-serving dishonesty, mainly—or they never would have gotten this far” as “[t]hey know quite well that answering a question about, say, an economic plan with numbers that do not add up is very hard.”

Continuing to cover for the liberal network by claiming that Republicans hate answering questions (while Democrats supposedly do), Nolan dismissed criticism of liberal media bias as “[a] simple scam, and one that never fails to work on the American voter” because “t is the rhetorical equivalent of waving one hand in the air while using the other hand to pick your pocket.”

Since “[m]embers of the media quietly loathe themselves for good reasons,” he pontificated that that mindset “renders them incapable of standing up for themselves when they are attacked by demagogues for bad reasons.”

With no shame, the Gawker writer concluded:

    The irony in all of this is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to denigrate the mainstream media. But none of those reasons are “they ask too many direct questions about the plainly farcical policy proposals of presidential candidates.” The real problems with the political media—its addiction to horse race journalism, unhealthy appetite for conflict at all else, its tendency to invent storylines out of thin air—are the things that voters like. The general public is ill-informed, easily bored, restless for entertainment, and does not understand economics. When CNBC’s moderators tried to ask straightforward economic questions (even going to the unforgivable extreme of citing math), the American public was well primed to hate the media and all it stands for. That is when the candidates struck.

    Hate the media all you want, America. The more you do, the less you know. In the end, we will get the president that we deserve. Unfortunately.

Source URL: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/curtis-houck/2015/10/29/gawker-whines-about-cnbc-criticism-attacking-media-most-popular

[rangerrebew]

Even Left-Wing Salon Thinks CNBC ‘Did a Terrible Job’
By Kyle Drennen | October 29, 2015 | 3:44 PM EDT
 

While conservatives have almost uniformly denounced CNBC for its biased and sloppy questioning throughout Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, even left-wing website Salon has joined in panning the network’s poor performance.

Political writer Jack Mirkinson began the piece: “It is usually a fool’s errand to make any predictions about something as fluid as a presidential campaign, but I’m comfortable with this particular gaze into the crystal ball: It’ll be a while before CNBC gets to host another Republican debate.”

He continued:

    There’s no getting around it: The network did a terrible job. From the moment people tuned in at 8 p.m. and saw a bunch of barely articulate anchors jabbering incoherently for an endless 15 minutes right to the second the debate met a merciful end, CNBC presented a textbook example of what not to do.

Mirkinson fretted: “The debate was so rowdy, shoddily paced and out of control that the ostensible subject of the evening – the economy – got hopelessly lost in the shuffle. Most damningly, the anchors frequently failed to call out the candidates on easily checkable misstatements.”

He bemoaned how CNBC’s failure gave the GOP candidates ammunition against the media:

    Perhaps sensing blood in the water, nearly all of the candidates pounced, brutally turning on the moderators over and over again and accusing them of asking needlessly antagonistic personal questions....No Republican has ever lost a debate by attacking the media, but Wednesday’s complaints were especially relentless—a sure sign of a moderating team that had lost the plot.

As TVNewser pointed out, numerous critics – many from liberal news outlets – saw CNBC as the “biggest loser” in the debate. 
Source URL: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kyle-drennen/2015/10/29/even-left-wing-salon-thinks-cnbc-did-terrible-job

[jmyrlefuller]

Doesn't Gawker make a living "attacking media?"