Ted Nesi is easily the most knowledgeable and well-respected local reporter on the pension beat. As such, it’s not easy to call him out for what I think is some bias in his pension reporting as of late.
Today on Twitter I asked him why he didn’t include either Angel Taveras or Ernie Almonte’s perspective when he reported that Gina Raimondo, Gordon Fox and EngageRI all disagree with the governor’s tack.
Yes, Raimondo, Fox and EngageRI are important players in this debate. But so are Almonte and Taveras, both of who had publicly weighed in defending Chafee by the time Nesi posted on the issue. WPRO had Almonte on Wednesday morning and RI Public Radio had a post on Monday saying Taveras thought, “the state should seek a settlement to a challenge by a series of unions to last year’s pension overhaul,” wrote Ian Donnis for RIPR.
Here’s the exchange we had on Twitter:
I’m confused. I thought Nesi’s Notes was basically an opinion blog. I never detected much of a pretense of impartiality. There’s nothing wrong with him expressing an opinion on his blog. RI Future is an opinion blog, after all.
The issue is that there are no liberal voices in the mainstream Rhode Island media. That’s the problem.
I have to agree that Nesi is a very good reporter but . . .
“@bobplain no, in other words, you’re looking for a conspiracy where there isn’t one”
Suggesting that someone who is suspicious about a person’s motivations is a conspiracy theorist is an age old silencing tactic I would have thought beneath someone like Nesi.
This just happened to come across my newsfeed on Facebook this morning:
www.alternet.org/media/10-brilliant-quotes-noam-chomsky-how-media-really-operates-america
One does not have to be a genius to recognize that anyone who doesn’t go along is not going to get along for very long in the commercial news media. From one of those ten quotes of Chomsky’s:
“”Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms.”
And about the insidious, Orwellian way the media presents itself? . . .
“ this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function. In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game.”
I gave Sam Bell’s comment above a thumbs up last night but . . .