Week 11: The Media’s Role in Democratic Elections

Greetings class,

I hope you are well and weathered the rather chaotic last week. Today, I will focus on media coverage of the election. It was a nail-biter but the good news is that news outlets were able to provide accurate and fair updates, despite concerted efforts to spread misinformation. Likewise, social media platforms censored misinformation, particularly that of the president, which could have had a serious negative impact on the elections.

Note: This Monday, November 9, Gerson Borrero of the El Diario will be coming to our synchronous JRN 211 class, 2-3. Please come if you can. Here is the Zoom link.

Topic: Invite November 9 – Gerson Borrero, El Diario
Time: Nov 9, 2020 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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ASSIGNMENT

Read through the lecture. I recommend watching both the Late Show with Stephen Colbert clip and the Time story on the Latino vote, both listed below. For the Discussion Board, we will continue to work on researching your media outlet. This week, please analyze two stories that the outlet covered recently. Were the same stories covered by the mainstream media? If so, do you see different angles or perspectives? How is the outlet serving its community with its coverage?

BIGGEST WHAMMY OF THE WEEK

Trump falsely claimed he won the 2020 presidential election even as votes were still being counted in key states. The networks cut away

.

Stephen Colbert reacts to the president’s false claim of winning the election, saying while he knew it was always a possibility, he didn’t think it would hurt so much.

SOCIAL MEDIA CRACKDOWN ON MISINFORMATION

Giant pro-Trump Facebook group shut down for promoting violence

NY Daily News: Some posters were promoting a second civil war, with one sharing an image that said, “Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets,” according to Vox. The group set up multiple in-person demonstrations in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona to protest continued vote counting in those states. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” Facebook said in a statement to USA Today. The tech giant also cited those in-person protests as a reason for the shutdown.

On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse

NYTimes: For the last four years, executives at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies have been obsessed with a single, overarching goal: to avoid being blamed for wrecking the 2020 U.S. election, as they were in 2016, when Russian trolls and disinformation peddlers ran roughshod over their defenses.

So they wrote new rules. They built new products and hired new people. They conducted elaborate tabletop drills to plan for every possible election outcome. And on Election Day, they charged huge, around-the-clock teams with batting down hoaxes and false claims.

So far, it appears those efforts have averted the worst. Despite the frantic (and utterly predictable) attempts from President Trump and his allies to undermine the legitimacy of the vote in the states where he is losing, there have been no major foreign interference campaigns unearthed this week, and Election Day itself was relatively quiet.

Fake accounts and potentially dangerous groups have been taken down quickly, and Facebook and Twitter have been unusually proactive about slapping labels and warnings in front of premature claims of victory. (YouTube was a different story, as evidenced by the company’s slow, tepid response to a video that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the election.)

Twitter permanently suspends Steve Bannon account after talk of beheading

CNN Business: Twitter permanently suspended an account belonging to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon after he suggested Thursday morning that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded. His comments were made in a video posted to his Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.

Bannon falsely claimed President Trump had won reelection, despite several key states still being too close to call, and said that he should fire both Fauci and Wray. He then said he would go further: “I’d put the heads on pikes. Right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone.”

The comments came during a livestream of Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” online show. The video was live on Bannon’s Facebook page for about 10 hours Thursday and had been viewed almost 200,000 times before Facebook removed it, citing its violence and incitement policies.

CNN has reached out to Bannon for comment.

NYTImes:

 Twitter

NYTImes:

 Earlier Saturday morning, before the race was called for Mr. Biden, Twitter flagged all of President Trump’s early-morning tweets, calling them disputed and potentially misleading after he made baseless claims about election irregularities.

Through Friday afternoon, Twitter labeled 15 of the 44 tweets and retweets Mr. Trump posted since the first polls closed on Election Day, according to a New York Times analysis.

The Disinformation Is Coming From Inside the White House

NYTimes: The president and his allies have united right-wing media and internet trolls with false messaging that legitimate vote counting should stop.

Social media platforms shared Joe Biden’s win to their millions of users, despite the fact that Trump has yet to concede.

NY POST & FOX NEWS

Oddly enough, even the NY Post, not known for negative stories about the president, covered some of the follies of the Trump family and close aides, while Fox News accurately called the election results.

Donald Trump Jr. calls for ‘total war’ in clueless tweet

NYPost: Donald Trump Jr. on Thursday fired off a tweet calling for his dad to wage “total war over the election” — while parroting the same allegations of voter fraud that his father has used to explain away his dwindling hopes of staying in the White House. Twitter quickly hid the message from view for spreading false information about the election.

The NY Post also reported on inflammatory texts sent to voters in Pennsylvania.

And the NY Post called out President Trump’s lies about winning the election.

Trump supporters lashed out at Fox News when it called certain states, like Arizona, for Joe Biden, and again when the network said he had won the election.

A

THE LATINO VOTE

How Democrats Missed Trump’s Appeal to Latino Voters

The election was a referendum on Trump’s America, but plenty of Latino voters liked it just fine.

NYTimes: Mr. Biden is now the president-elect, and as he vows to work “as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did,” as he said in his victory speech on Saturday, he must grapple with the fact that Mr. Trump actually improved his showing among Latino voters, from under 30 percent in 2016 to closer to one-third this year, according to exit polls and voter surveys.

Democrats lost in Florida, in part because of lackluster support among Latino voters. They did basically no better than they normally do in Texas, in part because Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley moved decisively toward the G.O.P. But in Arizona, Barry Goldwater’s home state and a once-conservative stronghold where Mr. Biden has a slim lead, Democrats will claim both of the state’s Senate seats for the first time in decades, fueled by young, progressive Latino voters.


Time: Why It’s a Mistake to Simplify the ‘Latino Vote’

REACTIONS

Slightly odd choice of photos for a fundraiser.

Have a good week!

Best
Professor McKenna

Date: November 9, 2020 Author: Comments: 0 Categories: Uncategorized
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