And yet what they get a high grade on factual reporting:
Media Matters
Getting a high grade on factual reporting from an ultra-liberal group of fact-checkers doesn't really mean much. It certainly doesn't somehow make them credible. In fact, even less so.
They are certainly an activist organization with a particular partisan slant - I suspect they view themselves as more of a media watchdog of rightwing propaganda and misinformation.
Possibly, but that's not what they do. Instead of being a watchdog and reporting what they find, they actively try to silence conservative voices and ideas in the media. The activism goes as far as lobbying advertisers to cease sponsorship of those voices (something the owner and operator of the aforementioned ultra-liberal group of fact-checkers attempted to do, until the backlash got too hot because it made them look slightly less than the fair and impartial fact-checkers they claimed to be).
Nope - read very carefully:
....
The House impeached Trump while he was THE President.
All I did was use the same logic you used to reason why the Chief Justice wasn't called for in the Senate trial. Trump was president when impeached, but because he's not the president at trial then the Chief Justice doesn't need to preside. But if he's not president at trial, it's impossible to remove him from office at that point.
The Senate has the sole power to try ALL Impeachments.
Nobody that I'm aware of disputes that fact.
Until the Senate disposes of it, it's a pending matter (... as evidenced by the fact .. that it is pending in the Senate ...)
Nobody disagrees with that, either.
Disposal is done through conviction or acquittal.
You're
en fuego. Except you forgot dismissal.
Clearly, the Senate has the power and the obligation to either dismiss the impeachment article(s) or hold a trial. Still unsettled is whether they have the power to convict and thus remove from office a private citizen who holds no office. Some people believe the Senate has that authority, some people do not. We'll never know until it happens. And I don't think it'll be settled with this trial, either.
Follow (or search Herridge) on @emptywheel on Twitter ... she's made a bit of thing of pointing out what Herridge all too conveniently omits and leaves out ... which slants Herridge's reporting.
I was hoping for something a little more concrete that showed Herridge is sometimes "challenged with facts," rather than one unabashedly biased journalist's opinions of another journalist's reporting approach and story angle. All reporting is slanted, maybe Marcy Wheeler's as much as anybody. Slant and bias start from which stories to report on, to which ones make it to print. Every reporter has a bias, but the good ones keep theirs in check. I'm not alone in not really considering Marcy a journalist, but rather a blogger with a plain bias. She occasionally does some really top-notch journalism, but it's tempered by some top-notch space cadet stuff.
Well, if one wanted to appear to be unbiased, that's what they would do ... right ?
Sure, I suppose, but refusing to offer an outright opinion when asked is hardly the litmus test for unbiased reporting. A good Five Ws journalist will omit the persuasion, the priming, the words and phrases which are used to assign someone their opinion and make the reader or listener think their opinion is their own. They are aware of their own bias, and take the necessary steps to remove it from their reporting.
A really good example of that is the recently infamous Georgia phone call. Catherine Herridge reported,
"Trump could be heard on the telephone conversation audio..."
Conversely, an example of spectacularly manipulative reporting is how the Facts First Folks at CNN reported it, with,
"Trump was caught on recorded audio..."
When someone is "caught" doing anything, it's never anything good. And you're guilty, because you literally got caught doing it. So without even hearing what Trump said, you've already been primed to have the opinion that whatever it is, it's bad, and it's not even open to interpretation or discussion. That's not even journalism, it's propaganda. And it's not just CNN, it's all over the mainstream media. All you have to do is look for it, and recognize it when you see it.
