A great example of the abject failure of US corporate media is how they spent a week talking about the ”bombshell” that the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation on Trump after he fired Comey.
WHO CARES! That information by itself is meaningless. The FBI opens all sorts of investigations all the time. The most important part is what the investigation TURNED UP!
But they almost never explain that part in all the reporting I saw. They just tell you the first part - the clickbait ineuendo - but they don’t tell you the most important information - the result of the investigation!!
Well if you dig deeper, you find out it was handed off to the mueller investigation before it really got very far. Why did I have to listen and read so hard to figure that out? Why are they making it sound like this is a slam dunk case? Why are they acting like the president being under investigation for conspiracy with Russia is a new thing? It's been happening for more than a year in public!!
At best this should be communicated as another key fact in the ongoing case - but instead it was presented as evidence, in-and-of-itself, that the president was guilty.
What a waste of ink and air time. What a massive distraction from the real and dangerous things he’s doing and the real and ongoing investigations into every facet of his life and presidency. What a way to undermine their own credibility. What a dangerous way of blowing the headline and crying wolf for when the real results of the investigation come out.
I witnessed this first hand at Uber. They can make anything sound like news and/or damning evidence just by the music, images and word choice they play with the data.
I just saw it happen again with Uber just this morning. I got a CNN Alert about a leaked, Uber funded, year old report on the safety team showing that they were stressed out about the case-load and tough customer issues they were dealing with.
No suggestion that Uber is doing the right thing to commission the report to get answers, no information about what has since changed thanks to the report's findings, no information about how others in the field handle this kind of stress/organization. Nope. Just a sense that Uber fucked up. Which is not proven based on the evidence available (potentially the opposite actually).
Failure of the 4th estate.