Proof that RT trolling is still better than Fox News trolling.
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This is hilarious. I lived in West Michigan for 10 years. Yes it’s a city, but like anywhere in MI you are not far from the sticks. My gf lived in Ada just outside of GR. Super religious and conservative, home to Amway. It looks like this is where they pulled these people lol.
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WaPo article by noted hack Megan McArdle:
This Christmas, be thankful for the gifts of trade and innovation. And cake.
How about free Healthcare?
Key campaign clash? LED light? Wtf.
Trump has won the war with the media and beaten them into submission.
Be thankful for the things every country on earth has, but try to forget about the plenty of things every other developed nation has.
Shutting down pressers was a huge win for this administration.
The media is so fundamentally gutless and unprepared that they just went from reporting on a press conference to reporting on administration propaganda, treating each source of information roughly equally in terms of legitimacy.
I know we say it a lot but it really must be repeated every single day. They news media in this country is complicit with our slide into totalitarian autocracy, and people are absolutely dying because of how terrible they are at their jobs.
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They aren’t terrible at their jobs though. Their jobs just aren’t what we think they should be.
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They think their jobs are what we think they are though. They think they’re brave, The West Wing was a documentary etc.
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I don’t know man. The Chuck Todd thing leads me to believe they really are just dumb. Like yes, the result of their incompetence is to benefit entrenched power, including on the “left,” but there isn’t some grand conspiracy. They’re just useful idiots.
It’s not quite the same thing, but in the UK they justify their complicity by saying their duty is to report what politicians are saying. So that’s how they knowingly just parrot propaganda uncritically, whilst still maintaining a self satisfied belief they are real journalists.
That’s not journalism though. That’s transcription, as Soledad correctly loves to point out.
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Absolutely, court stenographers, if you will. I’m just parroting their propaganda!
So a few points about what’s gone wrong in the media…
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Newspapers are dying. This is happening because what was once a monopoly on local advertising (a pretty great business) has been absolutely gutted by the internet. Most reporters historically worked for newspapers and they’ve been absolutely slaughtered. This is where the vast majority of people got their daily news as recently as the late 90’s. Great monopoly businesses can do inefficient stuff like write accurate but watching-paint-dry boring articles about local/regional/national/world issues.
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24/7 news happened, and was perfected (as a business) at Fox News. The problem with 24/7 news channels is that they aren’t really news, but actually just reality TV. They take whatever real news happens through the day and process it into something entertaining enough to compete with entertainment television. They aren’t trying to inform anyone of anything, they are trying to capture as many eyeballs as possible so they can sell those eyeballs to advertisers. It turns out outrage draws eyeballs really well, and viewers switch the channel when they see something that doesn’t confirm the views they already hold. What follows is pretty predictable, and is what you’ll see if you turn on any 24/7 news channel.
I think advertising as a revenue stream (without the monopoly part which is dead forever) is inherently corrosive to being informative. Being informative by definition means leaving in the boring parts and occasionally telling someone something they don’t want to hear. Those aren’t acceptable on a TV network that has to sell eyeballs for extremely obvious reasons.
I want hard news so that I can make decisions in the real world, because I essentially make decisions for a living. People like me are extremely easy to monetize because we have money and will pay a lot of money for a useful tool. That’s why Bloomberg exists. And make no mistake Bloomberg is selling excellent capital N News. It looks absolutely nothing like what you see on the 24/7 networks. The Washington Post and NYT are selling watered down versions of that with a little bit of a political spin to make the educated people happy.
Bottom line I don’t actually think the low information people who watch 24/7 news being informed is important because they have no actual interest in being informed. All cable news is doing is taking their existing biases and pushing them further in the direction they already are. If they vote I’d be fine with them voting their tribe (like they are going to anyway) and getting their news in a second hand relatively rare kind of way.
I freely admit that social media is a whole other ball of wax and is being used to spread propaganda, much of which makes the 24/7 news channels look tame. That’s it’s own problem and it needs addressing as well.
We’ve had a technological revolution in communication and up to now our approach has been to let it run free because the founders of the revolution were basically libertarians. Turns out that doesn’t work very well and we need to fix that somehow. I don’t know enough about it to be able to make an educated suggestion beyond ‘it needs to be fixed’ because it does. I’m not only talking about political propaganda, we’re bringing back measles thanks to the internet lol.
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Trying to imagine what that would even mean.