Buzzfeed News (not Buzzfeed) did an AMA on reddit. Really interesting plus some hints at what’s percolating.
What is your Personal opinion/hypothesis on Trump’s involvement? How does reporting on this affect you emotionally?
[–]buzzfeednews[S]
I don’t do personal opinion. That’s not my bag. But I will say this: So many of the people in Trump’s orbit are absolutely toxic and it chips away at your soul having to deal with them. -ac
Insult a sexual abuse survivor. Tax fraud and invasion revealed. What does that yield?
Political triumph.
Coupled with the Washington Post piece that chortles the Republicans political acumen, the MSM rehabilitation of trump and the morally depraved Republican Party begins in earnest, weeks before the midterm.
(Not providing links to these monuments to shitty journalism, so screen grabs.)
I love how getting a Republican nominee through a Republican-controlled Senate demonstrates political acumen heretofor only spoken of in hopeful whispers.
The way the media is wired, if a Republican manages to tie his shoes by himself in the morning, it’s an amazing act of statecraft. (See: Paul Ryan’s entire career.)
If a Democrat rescues a hospital full of orphans from a fire on the west coast in the morning, leaps into the sky and flies across the country at noon (dodging anti-aircraft fire the whole time,) lands and evacuates ten thousand hurricane refugees on the east coast in the afternoon, and then cures cancer in his spare time in the evening, then he’s a divisive failure, because the reporter talked to three people from his own party who wondered why he didn’t do it earlier.
Having read the above coverage, Republicans will uniformly condemn the media for their left-wing bias.
Can all this be chalked up to DC/NY reporters skewing liberal and therefore bending over backwards and upside down to make themselves feel ‘objective’?
I think it’s astonishment at the GOP base, basically.
What happens is so horrifying they can’t imagine how the GOP goes from strength to strength, so when they win against all common sense and decency, it suddenly feels a lot like political acumen.
Not sure we need more NYT is bad, but, well, NYT is bad.
There was a Twitter thread posted here not too long ago from someone at CNN or MSNBC, responding to complaints that they weren’t covering climate change news. The bottom line was that it’s just a complete dud for ratings, people just don’t care.
No surprise. I don’t think we would be able to muster the effort to stop an asteroid from hitting the earth and killing all humans in 2030. 12 years away is just too distant to think about for most people. Remind me in 10 years.
The most selfish generation is determined to not do anything, and damage things as much as possible before they die.
That was me, and it was Chris Hayes. Seems to me that media can be persuasive enough to at least get people to start paying attention, but maybe I’m just too naive.
That said, that NYT headline can also be framed as heads you lose, tails you lose.
“If Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed there will be hell to pay from an energized Republican base.”
He’s confirmed, so now the story is:
“There is hell to pay anyway because of an energized Republican base.”
Politics is almost always framed as winners and losers, without context or without looking at the bigger picture.
Instead of framing the story as norm destroying Republican rhetoric, sexual assault survivors are portrayed as the aggressors and poor Brett Kavanaugh and by extension all men are the real victims (further aggravated by the Soros nonsense.)
Here’s Josh Marshall from TPM (got this from another source and I don’t have the link, I think it’s for subscribers only. I probably shouldn’t post it, but he articulates it well.)
What this all means is that conservatism and the GOP are now Trumpism. More significantly it means that it is transferable. Others can pick up the mantle and make it work. This is hardly surprising. Last year Rep. Greg Gianforte body slammed a reporter days before his election and is now a Representative in good standing who is often praised for his physical toughness. Equally significant, Trumpism didn’t begin with Trump. I take some pride in the fact that I think this site has done as good a job as any news publication in the US over the last 18 years chronicling the rise of the revanchist right in the Republican party and the party’s subsequent transformation. The politics of aggression, norm-breaking, the penchant for conspiracy theories, the increasingly explicit white nationalism – these were all present in 2014, 2010 and in a more attenuated form in 2004. What Trump did was, through some malign and impulsive intuition, fused these together into a workable politics. He took what was still the underbelly of Republican politics, which nevertheless provided it with the bulk of the GOP’s motive force, and made it the face, the brand.
Kavanaugh himself is a noteworthy bridge. A scion of the beltway political elite who received the country’s finest elite education, he made his name in the Bush White House. He is the epitome of the pre-Trump conservative establishment. Yet we can see here how seamless the transition was to full Trumpism, as it was for all the Republicans Senators who rushed to his side after his Thursday afternoon performance
Even on NPR this morning, they had a republican operative spouting rubbish about radical protestors screaming and clawing at senators, and how that is not going to play well with the suburban white woman. Nobody mentioned Kavanaugh screaming and clawing at senators during his confirmation hearing - about how unprofessional he was. It was all ‘screaming, shrill women are bad for the dems’
Just unbelievable, and especially on NPR.
Not just a Republican operative. He’s part of Trump’s 2020 campaign. And he’s a moron.
Isn’t that the definition of a republican operative? And NPR doesn’t refute his garbage. Journalists want so badly to be seen as non-partisan that they won’t call people on blatant lies for fear of being called unfair. Facts are facts and lies are lies, and they both need to be labelled as such.
What I don’t understand is how is it 2018 and journalists still haven’t figured that out?
They HAVE figured it out. You’re linking to the article, and people are clicking on it to read, aren’t they? They don’t care whether it helps or hurts a certain party or even whether it’s correct or not.
Clicks. All that matters is clicks.
What you see now is the end state. This isn’t an interim period where media are still trying to “figure it out.” It doesn’t get better.
I’m not linking to anything, just calling out what I heard on NPR on the radio. No clicks.
Yeah… the new metrics are engagement and clicks. Hot takes, outrage and food fights as far as the eye can see.
Sorry, I meant that to say not just ANY…
Yeah, and NPR already giving them free airtime to disburse their lies and fearmongering without a hint of pushback. We need some new media that aren’t scared to call lies lies. Maybe they’ll be so controversial with the right that they’ll also get clicks. Hate clicks, likely, but clicks nonetheless.
