Accuracy In Media is committed to our mission as your media watchdog to promote accuracy, fairness and balance in news reporting. In 2018, we worked hard to provide the analysis you can use to sift out the bias so prevalent in our mainstream media.
Our new media bias ratings system, was launched this year and was featured this year on President Trump’s Facebook page in an interview with Lara Trump. It rates mainstream news coverage along a rating scale from “Accurate” through “Fake News.” AIM was also featured in Good Morning America’s digital Election Day Special.
Our most popular stories of 2018 are highlighted below:
5. “Media Ignores Damage Stone’s Recovered Emails Do To Mueller Probe”
A story on the Daily Beast could blow the lid off a key piece of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The kicker head above the story, and its title – “Texts Show Roger Stone, Randy Credico Discussing WikiLeaks Plans: NBC” – indicate the story’s contents are bad for Stone and his friend President Trump, and could lead to criminal sanctions against one or both.
The lead of the story continues down this path. “Radio host Randy Credico was providing former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone with ‘regular updates’ about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans to release hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, text messages obtained by NBC News show,” the story read.
4. “WikiLeaks Pushes Damning Evidence About Collusion Between Clinton, NY Times”
The New York Times published a story Saturday headlined, “Republican Attacks on Mueller and F.B.I. Open New Rift in G.O.P.”
That same day, WikiLeaks posted a late-night tweet saying not so fast, NY Times, Daily Wire reported. WikiLeaks revealed that a Times reporter exchanged emails with the State Department—which Hillary Clinton headed at the time—about stories in progress, often days before they were published.
3. “Study: Media Avoided Mentioning Nearly All Evidence Against Ford”
Christine Blasey Ford has said in her opening statement she spent the last two weeks having her life picked apart. But, according to a study by the Media Research Center, she’s had far less of this than Brett Kavanaugh.
Media Research Center looked at morning and evening news coverage on the big three broadcast TV networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – for the 12 days after her allegations that Kavanaugh held her down and tried to remove her clothes at a house party in suburban Maryland in 1982.
It found the three networks devoted 344 minutes of coverage to Ford’s allegations, but only 37 minutes of that time – about 8 percent – was spent on possibly exculpatory information on Kavanaugh.
2. “NY Times Issues Serious Retraction in Kavanaugh Assault Story”
The New York Times was forced to retract a false claim that a witness remembered the alleged sexual abuse that accuser Christine Blasey Ford said was perpetrated by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The New York Times article, jointly written by Peter Baker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, originally claimed that a witness, Mark Judge,a close friend of Kavanaugh who Ford said was in the room when the alleged assault occurred, “had told the Judiciary Committee that he does remember the episode.”
Yet in actuality, Judge told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in a statementthat he does not remember the alleged event.
“I have no memory of this alleged incident. Brett Kavanaugh and I were friends in high school but I do not recall the party described in Dr. Ford’s letter. More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes,” Judge said in a statement sent by his lawyers to the committee.
1. “New York Times Issues Huge Correction Regarding Trump Campaign Investigation”
The New York Times has been inconsistent in its reporting around the FBI and the investigation of the Trump campaign, which led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Fox News’ Howard Kurtz reports about the paper’s changed tune: “The New York Times has run a rather stunning correction, only a year and a half after the fact. Deeply embedded in a lengthy and newsworthy piece about the origins of the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, the paper had to revisit its old story on the very same subject: ‘When The New York Times tried to assess the state of the investigation in October 2016, law enforcement officials cautioned against drawing any conclusions, resulting in a story that significantly played down the case.’
Reprinted with author’s permission from Accuracy in Media
