Mainstream Media

The media deserve credit in getting Trump to reverse his family separation or (is it seperation ?) policy.
The iconic picture of the girl, the audio, and the screaming at Sarah Huckabee, I think all had an impact.

Some credit, yes, but my guess is that this is what really did it.

When Franklin Graham and Ralph Reed are both criticizing a Republican President, you know something has gone horribly wrong.

Absolutely. I think Trump could strangle Muslims on live TV, and those two would mumble something about smiting the pharisees. But I guess they draw the line at putting kids in concentration camps.

Good to know that there is a line, somewhere.

Trump rips children away from families and puts babies into concentration camps. People get angry about it.

“Boy, this anger sure is uncivil. Can’t we politely sit and discuss government-sponsored racially-based child abuse in a pleasant give and take?”

Look, there are some fine angry people on both sides…

Pushing old ladies it off the way of buses is the same as pushing old ladies into the path of buses, because in both cases your pushing old ladies around.

https://www.salon.com/amp/why-wont-the-mainstream-media-tell-the-truth-about-racist-ghoul-stephen-miller

This is unsurprising. So much of TV “news” is now opinion shows with bare snippets of the actual news thrown in. We have to get six to eight hot takes on every bit of information. This really started coming at the turn of the century IMO.

As an anecdotal aside… when I wrote at Evil Avatar in '99/'00… I made a point of putting any opinion I had in a separate section after the actual gaming news story separated with a dividing line. I thought that gave the reader a really important distinction and helped separate the two. I don’t think modern media does enough to create that sort of separation.

I feel like NPR really took a turn in their coverage yesterday and this morning. It’s the first time I’ve heard them call out President Trump’s lies explicitly like this.

Here was the piece from yesterday on All Things Considered:

https://www.npr.org/2018/06/20/621876079/when-the-white-house-cant-be-believed

And they continued that tone today on Morning Edition. It’s jarring to me, because NPR is usually so aggressively neutral in tone, even in the Trump era, until now.

It’s been a chink in our armor and one of the vulnerabilities that Trump exploited, wittingly or not. You have the propaganda outfits on the Right, whether it be Limbaugh and other radio, or Fox News. Then you had a bunch of news organizations that, even if you accept they were staffed by liberals and had a liberal bias, tried for impartiality, balance, and being “neutral”. That directly led to all the whataboutism and email madness in 2016. It also leads a lot of people that “think the truth is somewhere in the middle” ending up far off the mark when they try to balance the various news.

Sometimes you just need to call a spade a spade. That’s especially true when you have an authoritarian demagogue in the White House that is imposing cruel and inhumane policies.

Even a reporter - and reporters, in general, are very careful not to express opinion but rather just report - but even a reporter, visibly shaken, yesterday just stated as fact, “Everyone is lying to us.”

I hope the media starts doing more of this. trump is not normal, this administration is not normal. What is going on now goes far beyond partisan politics.

It’s about damn time. Before I suspended my sustaining membership, I was treated to an almost CNN level of groveling towards administration officials, in the service of maintaining “access” I suppose. Multiple mornings the listeners would be assaulted by Seb Gorka of all people, never being challenged on his blatant lies, only to have the next guest, usually a Democrat get grilled by the hosts for having positions besides “the president has vast powers and will not be challenged.”

If they maintain this stance, and drop the naked appeasement of the right (hey NPR you can jerk them off all day and they’ll still Bye Felicia your funding), then I can feel comfortable donating again. Hope that day is soon.

(Just saw this Atlantic piece, written before the immigration story blew up, but it illustrates what ails the media.)

It was a framing that might have worked with any other two presidents. On Friday, The New York Times published a comparison of how Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, approached controversies over racism. “Obama offered balm. Trump drops verbal bombs. But both were accused, in a polarized country, of making racial tensions worse,” the paper tweeted.


The framing of the piece illustrates how the American discourse concerning racism remains largely about hurt feelings, rather than discriminatory policy: Some people said Obama acknowledging racism was racist, and also some people don’t like that Trump is called racist. This ostensibly neutral framing is centered around a white audience more concerned with being called racist than facing racial discrimination, and one that experiences racism as naughty words rather than as policies that affect whether and how people live their lives. This is why the cancellation of a sitcom about a Trump supporting white working-class family draws more press coverage than the fact that the aftermath of Hurricane Maria may have caused almost twice as many American casualties as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a national trauma so harrowing it continues to shape American politics almost two decades later.

Hey I was wondering if the NYT was garbage or not, thanks for clearing that up.

It wasn’t always so. :(

Pours out a 40

Tom Arnold is on ALL the drugs in CNN right now.

Oh yeah. He’ll do that. I remember many years ago he was on some late night show and he was obviously tweaking. I thought to myself that the universe should have some way of preventing a person in that condition from going on live TV, but apparently it doesn’t.