2y ago

White House to send letter to news execs urging outlets to ‘ramp up’ scrutiny of GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry ‘based on lies’

www.cnn.com

White House to send letter to news execs urging outlets to 'ramp up' scrutiny of GOP's Biden impeachment inquiry 'based on lies' | CNN Business

The White House plans to send a letter to top US news executives on Wednesday, urging them to intensify their scrutiny of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, despite having found no evidence of a crime.

“It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies,” Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote in the letter, according to a draft copy obtained by CNN.

The letter, which said an impeachment inquiry with no supporting evidence should “set off alarm bells for news organizations,” will be sent to executives helming the nation’s largest news organizations, including CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, the Associated Press, CBS News, and others, a White House official familiar with the matter said.

33 comments

This is pretty ridiculous. Every politician is full of shit to at least some degree, and our "reporters" are horribly biased and broken. If they really want to do something about it, they can discuss broadcasting standards or maybe consequences for deliberately deceptive journalism. No single group or issue should have its own standard.
- that would literally put the entire Murdoch empire out of business, you can't do that!
- Yeah, maybe the white house should do a better job of pushing back instead of trying to pressure news executives to change their reporting. It's the same type of behaviour that made the Twitter files stuff so compelling, and this is only going to backfire.
  
  If the White House pushes back, it is shrugged off as "of course they would."
  If the press digs into the investigation and finds that the investigation itself is meaningless political theater, it has more credibility
  Moreover, the Biden admin is demonstrating their absolute confidence in having nothing to hide.
Covering impeachment as a process story – Republicans say X, but the White House says Y – is a disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable.
Thank God someone finally had the balls to tell this to the press. If someone says it's raining and someone says it's not, it isn't the press's job to report both sides of the story. It's their job to put their fucking head out the window and find out!
Republicans: see? Now we have evidence that the liberal biased mainstream media take their marching orders from the Democrats.
- I mean, I can't entirely say I would blame the average conservative for seeing it that way. The optics of this move on the Biden administration are terrible. The impeachment attempt is bullshit, but Biden reaching out to the media to shine more of a spotlight on it does look like an attempt at collusion between the media and the Democrats. This is absolute candy to conservative conspiracy theorists.
  
  The Democrats have been so disadvantaged by the media over the last decade that they're now publicly begging them to actually investigate and cover the news thoroughly rather than regurgitating sensationalized Republican propaganda and that looks like collusion between the media and the Democrats to you?
  
  Assuming this is a data-based decision I'm guessing pollsters and their swingometers have decided that the conspiracy nuts are just a lost cause and this will win more independent votes than are in the delta of lost Republican apostate votes
  
  Agree. This is a really bad move.
  
  It doesn’t matter. Whatever Biden does or doesn’t do, right wing media blames him. Stop catering to these people. Facts are facts. Report them.
Fox News plans to respond by sending the White House a print-out of a photo of Hannity giving them the finger.
Then he'll spend a week on the "Biden crime family."
- Actually, it's a picture of Hunter, and that's not his finger....
9 months and no evidence...
- Well it's um... in Hunter Biden's laptop!
  
  i heard hunters laptop has a big hard drive
I'm sure the corporate conservative media, oops, I mean "liberal media", absolutely won't engage in bothsiderist "objective" horse race douchebaggery this time around... 🙄
Well that was fucking stupid, all you're doing is giving me opposing party ammunition
- They aren't giving them ammunition if they have nothing to hide.
  
  Pretty dumb take tbh
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The correspondence comes one day after McCarthy announced that he had directed three House committees to begin an impeachment inquiry into Biden.
House Republicans, most of whom have denied that disgraced former President Donald Trump committed any wrongdoing, have long sought to baselessly portray Biden as a corrupt, crime-ridden politician engaged in sinister activities.
While news organizations have published innumerable fact checks on the matter, they have also often failed to robustly call out the mis- and disinformation peddled by Republicans in their coverage, frustrating officials in the Biden White House who believe that the news media should be doing more to dispel lies that saturate the public discourse.
In its letter Wednesday, the White House will ask news organizations to be more clear-eyed in their coverage of the impeachment inquiry, and not to fall prey to the traps of false equivalency in reporting.
“Covering impeachment as a process story – Republicans say X, but the White House says Y – is a disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable,” Sams wrote.
“And in the modern media environment, where every day liars and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox, process stories that fail to unpack the illegitimacy of the claims on which House Republicans are basing all their actions only serve to generate confusion, put false premises in people’s feeds, and obscure the truth,” Sams added.
The original article contains 448 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 46%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Why is the administration telling news execs what to report on, and how to frame it?
- They aren't. They're asking the news outlets to do the due diligence they should already be doing.
  
  It's weird that we are at the point where suggesting that journalists do actual journalism (not report "both sides") is considered something outside the norm. So shameful.
  "If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the f*cking window and find out which is true"