“The deaths of at least four workers in recent days are raising questions about whether supermarkets will be able to hire enough workers to continue operations”
Old idiots think that millennials are either in college or just out.
Stephen A. Smith is just soooooooo mockable
Lol
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Is this article 12 years old?
The GOP will just cut the expanded unemployment benefits and leave the poor no choice.
It’s not “rape” rape!
Lol “quietly.”
Fuck these people.
I’ve said it many times here before, but the trick to being a serious, respected MSM journalist is to just pretend that you’re an absolute goddamn imbecile. “Dr. Fauci, why isn’t the administration listening to the experts? Why?” I dunno Jake, real fucking puzzler you got there, but I’m sure if you pose the question to one of Trump’s underlings with a sad puppy-dog look you’ll uncover the truth. Dr. Fauci can’t speak the truth because he’s working under constraints, but what the fuck is stopping you from laying it out explicitly? Everyone knows Trump is lying his ass off at al times, that should be the axiomatic starting point of any interview, it shouldn’t be a puzzle for the viewers at home to work over.
https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1249325601804161028?s=20
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The body language alone is all you need to see. Jake knows fully well that he’s just going through the motions and asking pointless questions from a Trump administration official who will toss out a bunch of useless apologetics. You can see Fauci is also just going through the motions and repeating milquetoast talking points that hopefully won’t anger Trump.
There’s a book I wish to recommend called “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt, bewcause I think it was incredibly prescient. A key aspect of bullshit is that it’s unconcerned with the truth-value of what’s being said. Bullshitting is different from lying in subtle ways. Jake understands that he’s not getting either truth or lies from Fauci. Fauci knows he can just bullshit for a few minutes and be done with it. The viewers at home understand that everyone is acting in bad faith. Fundamentally there is no possible way viewers can consume this news-like product and be informed. If the point of journalism is to inform the public, they should have stopped any interview with any Trump official from day one.Like, Sean Spicer lying about inauguration crowd sizes should have been the last straw, but of course it wasn’t.
Between Jake and Fauci and the viewers m, every single person involved with this exercise understands the truth of the situation, which is that Trump is a bumbling, incompetent clown who’s fucking up a public health crisis and doesn’t care if anyone dies. But still, the weird performance art must go on and Jake must ask the Trump official why warnings were ignored. Why? It’s the most pure example of bullshitting you could ever wish for.
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I’m rambling a bit, but I think an axiom of journalism is that the material you present should inform your audience. Also, it’s clear that Trump officials are prepared to lie shamelessly about anything.
Given the above, any interview with anyone in the Trump admin needs to be prefaced with a disclaimer that the Trump administration constantly lies about everything. The context matters. If you’re going to ask the director of the NIAD why Trump is ignoring expert advice, you need to explain to your viewers what we can ever hope to learn from the complete bullshit answers we’re going to be subjected to. It seems to me that any interview with a Trump official is completely fucking pointless and maybe instead you should be interviewing actual credible experts who aren’t going to lie to you?
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Part of the problem is the 24/7 business model of TV nooz journalism. There has to be something on the screen every single night. An interview with Dr. Fauci is a pretty easy get, it fills the space between commercials.
But who the fuck is being informed here? That’s the point of news, right, informing the consumer? An absurdly credulous CNN tool asks a Trump official why Trump lies all the time --does anyone expect to learn anything from whatever answer comes out? But Jake and Fauci have to participate in all of this performative bullshit because they have to have something on the screen for viewers to watch. Also, people have stopped watching CNN in droves because they learn nothing from it. Funny how that works.
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I agree with everything you just said. Since I have absolutely zero ability to change any of it, I stopped watching entirely. I get way better information and maintain much lower blood pressure by learning about what’s going on in the world from this site and twitter.
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I’ve made this point a couple times in the past, but in some theoretical sense, yeah, it may be an axiom of journalism that they are supposed to inform their audience, but that’s not how supposed journalistic outlets like CNN are structured to operate. That is there is no incentive structure that rewards or penalizes “informative journalism.” Their only incentive is profit, and that doesn’t care about the truth. It cares about clicks and eyeballs, regardless of what is getting them. There may have been a time when generally people assumed that you couldn’t build/maintain an audience as a news outlet if you were obviously and constantly spewing bullshit, so the outlets self-regulated to a certain extent, but I think the rise of Fox News has shattered that paradigm (it could have happened earlier, I dunno, maybe Rush Limbaugh’s success was the beginning?). People want emotionally triggering content above all else. Most potent is stuff that outrages, so that’s what we get.
I don’t know what the solution is. Well, the solution is to stop watching that shit, but I don’t think it will be effective because I do t think you can get a critical mass of people behind the idea to radically shift the behavior of news outlets. I mean, we still have people on here who regularly tune in to the Trump briefings and these meaningless “news” segments with known bullshitters in the Trump admin. WAAF shrug
Lol NYTimes headline:
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