At least, "getting it wrong" was how the responsible CEO of Topix Media, the British Telegraph, and numerous others phrased it. Newsweek distanced itself from the edition, telling the world the magazine was produced by Topix Media, not Newsweek.
The German Der Spiegel reported this as a "mistake" and added two additional bits of information, one explicit, the other not so much. They are worth our attention.
Der Spiegel printed a photo of a woman at a table or desk looking at a copy of the magazine. The caption under the photo simply says "Newsweek edition". They do not tell the reader who the person at the desk is. If you watch a lot of TV, you may guess that the lady may be Hillary. But no confirmation under the photo, nor in the article.
To get the full picture, the blogster went to Twitter and found this, posted by ABC reporter Cecilia Vega:
The Twitter time stamp says the tweet was posted at 5:25 AM on November 9, just after election results told us Trump won. The Tweet says the photo was taken on Monday and that is shows Hillary signing a copy.
Comparing the two photos makes it very clear that Der Spiegel was more charitable by not showing the autograph. At the same time, they could not resist a "hint", it would seem.
Other German outlets went without any photo, for example, NTV.
The media outlets the blogster has seen printed very similar story lines. "Mistake" or "getting it wrong" with an exculpatory "like everyone else". They also mentioned "historic road to the White House" and "shattered glass ceiling".
The Telegraph added, like other English language outlets, a photo of the 1948 flub showing Harry Truman triumphantly holding the Chicago Tribune edition that incorrectly announced his opponent Dewey won.
So, the mainstream press (for lack of a better term) tried to keep it light. Other outlets were more vocal, for example, Truthfeed:
The Truthfeed piece launches into a full on "Idiots. Even more stupid, Hillary allowed herself to be photographed SIGNING the covers".
Truthfeed is somewhere on the right, clearly supporting Trump.
Compared to Truthfeed, Russian Sputnik News, frequently called "a Russian propaganda tool" or accused as being part of the Kremlin's "hybrid war" or "information war", was much more reserved than you would expect from an information war tool.
Sputnik gives ample room to the Topix chief and to a description of the situation but does call out Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald - and rightly so, if I may add.
Sputnik does close with a strong, unvarnished dig, but not at Mrs. Clinton: Newsweek was so sure their efforts would pay off, they seem to have forgotten that it is the people who choose the president.
Most importantly, Sputnik does not use a photo of Hillary with the Newsweek issue.
How you interpret the absence of the photo is up to you. Not that much of an information war going on? Are they truly evil masterminds just pretending to not kick someone who is down? Were they too stingy to pay for the pic?
We have talked about two aspects of coverage, the photo and the different tones (light to aggressive), but there is more, and for that we need to go back to Der Spiegel because no body else (it seems) bothered to cover it.
Two sentences from Der Spiegel are relevant for this: "What would the media have written if Hillary had won" and "Rather common media practice"**.
Common practice
As a media consumer, you should always keep this one in mind. A lot of what makes up news coverage is not written after an event. Opinions and stories around an event can and do exist prior to an event. Take something like a mass shooting or a terrorist attack as an example. There are facts, like the where, when, who, why - they are reported after an event occurs. But even there, the "who" and the "why" tend to be fluid or (that's what we call propaganda) pre-packaged in a biased way.
How serious this practice is depends on the event. For instance, in a 2014 post, the blogster asked Time Travel by German National Parliament on 25 June?
What would the media have written
This is a bit disingenuous but can sort of slip through your critical analysis because of the unspecific term "the media" and the grammatical hypothetical question "shape" of the statement.
The article deals with something that was actually written!
Whatever analysis of the "historic" event we would expect after it occurs has already been put in writing before the event.
But we knew Hillary's positions, what with the debates and all the pros and cons laid out in detail before the vote count? That's all true, right?
There is a difference between these facts (so much as we can call them that) and presenting all of these events and narratives as making her the president.
In other words, had she won, then the Newsweek issue - and others that you do not know about - would have become the historic narrative, the "knowledge" and the "reasoning" other journalists and historians would build upon in their explanation of why the world is the way it is, in their explanation of the past and their prediction of the future.
Of course, TV folks have an easier life because they can change what they say without a long material production lead. But their notes were not different - just ask them.
To round out the story, a few words on the take of Snopes, a site dedicated to fact checking and debunking false stories and rumors. The Snopes piece was last updated on 7 November and deals only with the cover, labeled "Special Commemorative Edition", not with content. The Snopes entry is a direct and convincing debunking of claims by some that "the system is rigged". Snopes points out that preparing obituaries is common and sometimes embarrassing, and that the same is true for sports memorabilia.
The text of the Snopes image is hard to read, but you can make out a "went high" for Hillary as well as "as it turns out, the polls were wrong again" for Trump.
By now, the nicely positive "went high" has become "condescending", while the polls were indeed wrong. It would be nice to have the full content of both issues to see which parts of the narrative were merely political "legos", and what went beyond this.
* Was hätten die Medien geschrieben, wenn Hillary gewonnen hätte?
** Eigentlich ganz normal in der Medienbranche.
[Update 11/13] Added the Snopes photo and discussion of purpose of Snopes piece.
No comments:
Post a Comment