Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
Spare me the outrage from the press, when the press is the entity that helped create this mess.
All this could have been avoided some 6 years ago if these clowns in the press did their goddamn jobs. Trump had a history of corruption going back decades. Between sexual assault cases, crooked business dealings,connections to the Russians as well as connections to the mafia, and everything in between. Rarely any of that came to light or was taken as seriously as it should have been. It was one free pass after another. They gave him endless air time because they loved those sweet, sweet ad-dollars. They considered him a joke candidate and never dove deep into his past finances or connections.
…And then it happened. He was actually elected. And that’s when it became serious.
Fuck every last one of these journalists who just sat back, let him slide, and just let it happened. Now they have the gall to talk about authoritarian-this, and fascism-that.
The press isn’t monolithic. This is one journalist stating their opinion and analysis of what the rest of the industry needs to focus on.
Came here to say this. There is some excellent, probing journalism out there. The problem is, it’s not very profitable
and in there lies the rub, everybody’s gotta fill their own ricebowl
It is far more monolithic than people realize. Folks think that only the Fox News if the world were being overly generous to Trump when he was just a candidate. The reality is that all mass market news outlets were.
I was a loooong time listener of NPR, a news outlets that most would probably consider as neutral or even left of center as you’ll get from US mass media. And I totally lost respect for them hearing them cover Trump as a candidate. Even now, I can just about hear Steve Inskeep chuckling after a Trump speech and simply never taking him as a serious candidate. This was someone who was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes. And these fucken reporters, who I had previously held in high regard, were just laughing at some of the insane antics that Donald was pulling. They were letting this shit slide while they would have roasted any other candidate if they had said the same thing.
And it’s not just NPR but any mass media news outlets acted the same way. That’s where the majority of Americans get their news and they were all doing the same things.
NPR = “Nice Polite Republicans”.
Among the left, it’s always been a running joke that outlets like PBS (Petroleum Broadcast System) and NPR are somehow agents of liberalism.
I seem to recall NPR’s own ombudsman said they rely too much on corporate/conservative sources. They are not nearly as “liberal” as the unhinged right wing declares they are.
This all goes back to Reagan. He’s the one who really popularized the term “liberal media”. In labeling the media supposedly liberal (which it really wasn’t), it made that same media shift to the right because they naively didn’t want to be thought of as being biased. Well you keep doing that for some 50 years and even mass media outlets are right of center these days, and that doesn’t even include the really right wing outlets like Fox.
Then there is also the whole issue of media consolidation and corporate media. So you have fewer media outlets and those outlets are richer and more controlled by corporate interests. Corporations by default will lean to the right. So they will tend to naturally paint stories with a pro business, anti worker lean.
It’s all a big mess these days, so when I see these stories when people deep within the industry bemoan Trump, I can only help but consider these people as part of the problem.
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I refuse to give NPR any more of my time anymore. I used to have a very long commute so for many years my radio was locked in on them all the time (the fact that music stations are shit these days doesn’t help either). Not any more. I’ll look at their stories if they come across my news feed these days, but they lost their credibility with how they handled Trump with kid gloves and they lost even more credibility with how they tried to sink Bidens agenda more recently.
Our news media gives one free pass after another to Republicans and holds Democrats to impossibly high standards.
In terms of what I listen to now, it’s a random assortment of what comes through my feed. I really haven’t had a good “home” for news in a while and I don’t like that, but reading multiple sources is probably the best move regardless since you can see how various outlets spin the same story. I’d love to find some slick app that compiled many outlets so I could read them on my tablet that filtered out the noise but I’ve yet to find that solution.
Check out ground news. It’s designed to clearly and fairly show bias in news coverage and lets you compare multiple sources side by side. Their free level is not very good imo but the cheapest subscription adds a good amount of utility and the higher tiers even include media ownership breakdowns so you can see whose money is behind which coverage.
They also have optional emails like a “burst your bubble” newsletter that showcases blindspots for left right and center.
My one gripe is that they consider too many sources “left” when they are mostly just aligned with a center-progressive demographic, but that’s a minor quibble for me.
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I have PTSD from listening to too much Trump news during his presidency. I never want to hear another word about any president ever again for the rest of my fucking life!
Conversely, I had to stop listening to NPR during donny’s tenure, they got so one sided it was disgusting. I’m a Democrat but I don’t need my news to hold my hand and tell me stories. Maybe it was extra bad becuase it’s the Seattle NPR station, but regardless I’ve not returned since.
It’s one thing to be Fox News and everybody knows what kind of bullshit you’re up to, it’s another to be a well of respected news station and try and pull the same kind of bs.
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It means I’m aware that my party has problems and I don’t want the media that I watch to skirt around it, these issues need to be addressed on all sides.
We are never going to heal as a nation and start improving if we keep insisting on only “bettering our half of the equation”, or only “attacking the bad half of the equation”. That’s not realistic. Not every criticism that Republicans have of democrats is invalid either.
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Give us one example of NPR saying something incorrect about Tronald
I don’t know why you’re baiting me with things that I didn’t say
I had the opposite experience. I would listen to Mitch and others go spout blatant lies and receive absolutely no pushback from the hosts/journalists.
Thats problematic as well, agreed.
Thanks for your perspective, “ubermeisters”
It isn’t, I totally agree, but there are far fewer independently owned news outlets and far fewer owners than ever. And that is part of the reason we are here.
But, yeah, this is one of a few journalists reporting on what is actually happening with regard to Republican authoritarianism.
If you can control who gets a job based on their background, (example: “no socialists, gays, or jews. off the record policy”) you dont even need to use invasive mind control techniques. Just have your writing teams sniff their own farts.
People like murdock control huge swaths of news outlets. The corprate office issues propaganda scripts that individuals are forced to put their name on (example, by reading it aloud).
Yep. They did next to nothing to really vet him in any way. And so many had a vendetta against the Clintons that they just could not help but try to get their digs in on Hillary and Bill as much as possible, too.
Yup. Republicans had been building a case against Hillary for some 2 decades. So much so, in fact, that even seasoned Democrats were falling for those attacks against her were ingrained into our pop culture.
Such a shame because she would have made a perfect president. She was a pitbull that was willing to call Republicans on their shit.
The same seasoned Democrats that stacked the primaries in her favor? The 2016 election was the first time I had a real voice in an election and it felt like it was just vacuumed away. The candidate who seemed the most appropriate and the most qualified got swept under the rug in favor of the shit-throwers. She wasn’t perfect, she was a better terrible than Trump.
In 2020 the Democrats scrambled for a viable candidate and somehow Joe Biden was the best they could give us, and it was an absolute gamble. His victory in the 2020 election was dangerously overstated and the danger of a repeat of 2016 in 2024 was ignored.
Bernie Sanders lost the primary by 3 million votes.
Get your goddamn stories straight because I’m absolutely sick and tired of hearing Bernie bot dipshits who continue this myth that the primaries were somehow stolen from him… And yet he lost one primary after another after another after another. Somehow losing a primary equates to the DNC holding him back.
He made the mistake of counting on the lazy youth and the apathetic Left of this country and he got exactly what he had coming to him. I was happy to vote for him in the primary and I wanted him to win, but I knew from the get-go that counting on the youth vote in the US is a fool’s game. As usual, that base never materialized, but somehow we still have dipshits who want to claim that the DNC somehow “stacked” the primaries against him. And of course that led to many of them conveniently staying home on election day for the general election in November.
In my state, Hillary got 35% of the primary votes as opposed to Sanders getting around 52% (and a protest candidate getting most of the difference). As a consequence, she only got one more delegate from the state than Sanders (19 delegates vs Sanders 18), because all 8 unpledged delegates went to Clinton.
Having unpledged delegates declaring support for Clinton before most of the primaries even happened also put a damper on any chance Sanders had because it established him as being in a losing position before votes were even cast, which demoralizes his voters and helps edge undecided voters towards not supporting the apparent loser.
During the 2020 primaries there was an organization set up by former Obama and Clinton campaign staffers for the purpose of creating voting software to be used at polling stations during the primaries. It supposedly failed multiple times and led to victories that couldn’t be properly validated. However, anyone familiar with the primaries knows that the first few states are the most important because they determine the viability of candidates. Is it much of a surprise that Buttigieg who won Iowa, has a Cabinet position? You can call it a myth, but technically primary elections aren’t protected the same way general elections are since they decide a party’s candidate instead of the candidate who wins office.
Funnily enough, I would have voted for Yang in the 2020 election, but it’s not about who is a reasonable candidate. It’s all about those connections baby. Our country is run not by the most reasonable, but the most corrupt. Our most important election process is a game of prisoner’s dilemma.
At best you’re just a dipship who doesn’t know how things work and have been blinded by he-said/she-said right-wing propaganda spread by fake liberal sources that flooded the internet 7 years ago. At worst, you’re just one of many Russian trolls who actively were part of the Russian misinformation campaigns.
I was convinced she’d be a neoliberal and would make grand bargains with the GOP like Bill did. Those grand bargains included “welfare reforms” like kicking grandmas out of public housing when their grandkids would deal drugs in their project (like grandmas have the power to control their grown-ass grandchildren). The impacts of Clinton’s actions reached FAR beyond his presidency - I was fighting such evictions at Legal Aid during the second term of Bush Jr., evictions that were the result of Clinton’s bargain with the devil.
Though you’re right, most of the right’s anti-Bill Clinton bumper stickers during his 2 terms were actually shots at Hillary Clinton.
I’d bring back the Bill Clinton days in a heartbeat.
ALL politics is about compromise. Anyone that thinks anything can get accomplished in Washington without compromise doesn’t understand how our government works. Bill made the right choices the majority of the time and our country and the economy was booming because of it.
Compromises that make grandmas homeless are bad compromises. Clinton got away with it because nobody gives a shit about the projects, poor people don’t vote, and because black folk have been saying the system is rigged for far longer than literally anyone else. D’s don’t gain credibility with their ostensible base by stabbing them in the back.
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Okay buddy. Generational poverty doesn’t have any impact on subculture, it’s all about picking yourself up by your bootstraps even if you don’t know what fucking bootstraps are or where to find them. You’re right. Fuck them all, they should die for their moral failing of generational poverty and a worldview informed by the same. Everyone should experience poverty like the middle class does, a short term setback while getting an education.
Being poor doesn’t automatically make you a bad person. Not at all, actually, so stop using the excuse that because someone is poor that they will fall into a crowd that deals drugs. How convenient. Trashy people do that and they sure as fuck had no business being essentially funded by tax payer money. Fuck them and anyone who apologizes for those pieces of garbage.
Probably right, it’s unfortunate the people that ran her campaign were idiots and she listened to them.
It was Hillary Clinton that elevated trump as a pied piper, the media discovered an advertising and viewer gold mine. Had her hubris not gotten involved he may have never become president
“journalists”. That’s awful generous of you
Stenographers?
I remember Colbert’s session at the WH Correspondents Dinner and how the “liberal media” kept saying no one found it funny, it bombed, etc…not realizing that it was indeed funny to those not in the room. But making the “liberal media” the butt of the joke in some hard and hilarious truth-telling was more than they could bear, apparently, even if Colbert is part of the same media empire…
Co-conspirators. Is that better?
The press shit on trump like no tomorrow. It didn’t stick because they’d spent years and years eroding their own legitimacy, not because they didn’t air bad things about Trump.
Not a chance did they ever report on him in the seriousness that they should have. He was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes and the amount of investigative reportering they did was on par to someone running for city counsel.
He was on trial for sexual assault, and they gave that the same seriousness as the BS accusation against Biden who was wrongly accused to being touchy-feely. Somehow when you are the Republican candidate, multiple rape accusations are somehow the same as false touching accusations. And that’s just the free-passes they gave him on his sexual assault problems, let alone countless other things they could have dug into.
The media absolutely has lots a ton of legitimacy over the years and them giving him one free pass after another only made it worse.
The problem is 1/3 of Americans want to re-elect a serial rapist.
1/3 doesn’t win elections.
Getting the other 1/3 to stay home helps.
Getting some of them to switch sides does as well.
Getting the independent 1/3 to simply want a fresh face in there helps a whole hell of a lot as well.
During 2016 election The New York Times published thousands of stories about Clinton email/Benghazi, not one on Trumps lifelong ties to NY/Russian mob. As if The New York Times wasn’t in a particularly knowledgeable position to report on 70 years of NYC construction & mob history
I mean - you’re just wrong https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/trump-russia
this came out may 2017, after trump was sworn in dipshit
Might technically been wrong since you linked that one article, but the disparity is 100% real
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They have been highly problematic for a long, long time. It didn’t start with donnie.
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Um, no, they played the bothsiderist game during his run, all through his presidency, and even now. They keep pretending as if he’s a normal candidate and a normal president and his rabid base are just normal voters.