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Reporter Details Journalists’ Private Anti-Mormon Bigotry

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The press corps following presidential candidate Mitt Romney frequently displayed anti-Mormon bigotry through the election season, according to fellow reporter and BuzzFeed Politics author McKay Coppins.

Coppins, who is also a Mormon, offers several interesting bits of information and even makes Mitt out to be the John Kennedy of Mormonism; like Kennedy did for Catholics, Romney’s candidacy brought his religion out from under the shadows of suspicion and into the mainstream in politics.

Most importantly, the piece reveals the stark and casual anti-Mormon bigotry of fellow members of the Old Media establishment.

Coppins recalls that other reporters following Romney constantly sniggered about his “Mormon underwear” and often made jokes about his religion in the privacy of the press plane or on their many bus trips.

The jokes from his fellows made Coppins uncomfortable. At one point he “slid down in his seat” and pretended to look at his phone to avoid eye contact with the guffawing bigots surrounding him.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pew Research: Internet News Now Displacing Not Just Papers But TV, Too

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The transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.

Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site yesterday has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.

These are among the principal findings of the Pew Research Center’s biennial news consumption survey, which has tracked patterns in news use for nearly two decades. The latest survey was conducted May 9-June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults. For more on the growth of mobile technology, see the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report: “The Explosion in Mobile Audiences and a Close Look at what it Means for News,” released Oct. 1, 2012.

The proportion of Americans who read news on a printed page – in newspapers and magazines – continues to decline, even as online readership has offset some of these losses. Just 23% say they read a print newspaper yesterday, down only slightly since 2010 (26%), but off by about half since 2000 (47%).

The decline of print on paper spans beyond just newspapers. The proportion reading a magazine in print yesterday has declined over the same period (26% in 2000, 18% today). And as email, text messaging and social networking become dominant forms of communication, the percentage saying they wrote or received a personal letter the previous day also has fallen, from 20% in 2006 to 12% currently. There has been no decrease in recent years in the percentage reading a book on a typical day, but a growing share is now reading through an electronic or audio device.

Read more from this story HERE.

Americans’ Distrust of Media Highest in History

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Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Distrust is up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004.

The record distrust in the media, based on a survey conducted Sept. 6-9, 2012, also means that negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year. This reflects the continuation of a pattern in which negativity increases every election year compared with the year prior. The current gap between negative and positive views — 20 percentage points — is by far the highest Gallup has recorded since it began regularly asking the question in the 1990s. Trust in the media was much higher, and more positive than negative, in the years prior to 2004 — as high as 72% when Gallup asked this question three times in the 1970s.

This year’s decline in media trust is driven by independents and Republicans. The 31% and 26%, respectively, who express a great deal or fair amount of trust are record lows and are down significantly from last year. Republicans’ level of trust this year is similar to what they expressed in the fall of 2008, implying that they are especially critical of election coverage.

Independents are sharply more negative compared with 2008, suggesting the group that is most closely divided between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney is quite dissatisfied with its ability to get fair and accurate news coverage of this election.

More broadly, Republicans continue to express the least trust in the media, while Democrats express the most. Independents’ trust fell below the majority level in 2004 and has continued to steadily decline.

Read more from this story HERE.

LEFT-LEANING MEDIA OUTLETS WILL MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO READ PALIN’S E-MAILS

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Think you know everything there is to know about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin? Think again.

Since 2008, Mother Jones‘ David Corn has been actively petitioning for access to and public release of Palin’s e-mails. Following in the footsteps of Corn’s initial request, other media outlets subsequently began formally asking the Alaska government to release the e-mails Palin sent during her term. Mediaite sheds additional light on the scenario:

The state of Alaska initially told Corn that they had located 26,552 pages of emails, but are redacting 2,353 pages for unspecified reasons. Along these same lines, Palin apparently also used a personal email address for some of her official correspondence, and while the Alaskan government recovered some of these by looking through the official inboxes of some top officials, it’s possible that some communication was done among Palin’s personal account and the personal accounts of other State officials.

In sum, 24,199 pages will be presented for public viewing. In fact, Yahoo! reports that “Mother Jones, MSNBC.com and ProPublica“ are preparing to make the documents available for mass consumption ”in a searchable archive.”

In an op-ed for the Anchorage Daily News piece, Paul Jenkins writes that the e-mails may paint Palin in a very negative light:

The emails are going to be — if released in readable form after passing through lawyers‘ hands and being scrubbed by the governor’s office — delicious. There likely will be little good news in them for her. Having read only snippets of emails in Palin staffer Frank Bailey’s book, “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin,“ or ”Hey, I Got Emails Nobody Else Can Get and I Can Make Some Dough,” the venom, bullying, intimidation, absolute paranoia and craziness of the Palin administration spins off the pages.

What do you think about this? Should Palin’s e-mails be released by major media outlets in a “searchable database?” Once public, the media will surely find appealing tidbits to feature and focus upon for some time to come.

Read More at the Blaze By Billy Hallowell, the Blaze

Pro-Obama Media Always Shocked by Bad Economic News

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As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word “unexpectedly” or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

“New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed,” reported cnbc.com May 25.

“Personal consumption fell,” Business Insider reported the same day, “when it was expected to rise.”

“Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month,” Reuters reported May 25, “worse than economists’ expectations.”

From Human Events By Michael Barone, Human Events