WTF MSM!? Disclosure hypocrisy from NBC News and Vox

Glass houses …

Missing disclosure … When the news hit that Michael Cohen’s lawyers claimed Sean Hannity was his client, the media attacked Hannity over not disclosing any prior relationship. At the time, I wrote about the hypocrisy of folks like NBC’s Chuck Todd, who failed to disclose that he benefitted financially from his wife’s firm’s work for Bernie Sanders. The lack of disclosure doesn’t end there. Here are some things from NBC and Vox regarding the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile – my mobile phone service provider.

In its daily “Vox Sentences” email yesterday, Vox focused on the merger. The subject of the email was, “T-Mobile and Sprint promise their proposed merger won’t increase your phone bill.” The subject is pretty passive-aggressive and par for the course for Vox.

NBC News also reported on the merger. In its story, NBC reported quotes from a consumer advocate warning that the merger could raise prices.

Here’s why I’m flagging these two posts and this longer “voxplainer” by Matt Yglesias. NBC Universal is owned by Comcast. NBC Universal runs NBC news, and as disclosed by Matt Yglesias, when explaining the NBC Universal-Comcast merger, is a “main investor in Vox media.” While Yglesias disclosed the Vox-Comcast relationship, he didn’t disclose the part that really matters to this story.

Comcast sells mobile phone service. Here’s the website to Xfinity Mobile. When writing about the T-Mobile-Sprint merger, both NBC News and Vox should disclose this fact. The publishers of these stories have financial ties to a direct competitor of the entities they are raising concerns about.

Last night I asked Vox’s Ezra Klein via Twitter about the lack of disclosure and have not received a response. Here is Vox’s piece on Hannity and Cohen.

Opportunity cost … The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf is out with a piece attacking people who are wasting “time” and “resources” on covering the story about Joy Reid and her past homophobic blog posts. Friedersdorf doubled down in a tweet:

Did you get that? Writing about one of the cool kids of the Left and her past is not “plausibly justified as serving the public interest.”

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Whoopsie …

Runaway test … If you opened your Facebook account this morning, you may have noticed that every single post had a simple question under it: “Does this post contain hate speech?” My Twitter and Facebook timelines were blowing up with people sharing the new “feature.” I reached out to a spokesman at Facebook, who told me, “This was an internal test we were working on to understand different types of speech, including speech we thought would not be hate. A bug caused it to launch publicly. It's been disabled.”

So at this particular time, the feature was not supposed to be rolled out. That means that after testing, it may be. This type of feature is ripe for abuse and quite frankly cyberbullying. CR’s Chris Pandolfo has more on what happened this morning.

War crimes? … Michelle Wolf wasn’t the only person associated with Trevor Noah’s Daily Show who had some whoppers this past weekend. Dan Amira, head writer for the show, conducted an interview with former President Jimmy Carter for the New York Times Magazine. In the interview, Amira asks Carter if he thinks the U.S. has committed “war crimes” recently. Really? NewsBusters has the details. Who asks that question? Someone who probably believes it to be true.

No words … Yesterday I wrote that one of the reasons Michelle Wolf may have called Sarah Sanders “Aunt Lydia” is because the Left thinks of “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a documentary of life for women under Trump. Well, almost as if on cue, LA Times columnist Virginia Heffernan tweets this:

Wait, what? I mean, there’s nothing I can write that makes this tweet look more absurd than it already is.

May Day …

Today is May Day, the day communists and socialists around the world celebrate and try to convince you that they don’t support a murderous ideology that has killed millions. Spoiler alert: they do. Do you have personal experience living under a communist or socialist government – other than the soft, creeping socialism we have here in the U.S.? If so, I’d love to hear your story of how it affected you. Send me an email at reno@conservativereview.com. And as always, please consider using the forward and subscribe buttons below to let your friends know about WTF MSM!?.