Cokie Roberts (one of the resident liberals on the roundtable) is all like “If we show the bad people the sort of torture we do to them, they might use that to recruit more bad people!” Dammit, Cokie, take a few steps back and think about what you’ve just said.
And then Sam Donaldson just breaks my heart. He comes in saying “This is not Nazi Germany.” Sam, I have some really bad news for you. I think Sam Donaldson is the spirit animal for me and a lot of people at the time, we all just really underestimated how fundamentally broken this country is. I mean, he’s talking about holding the CIA accountable in the court of law, Sam, you sweet summer child from a more decent time and place, I just don’t know what to say to you.
In the primary, a black surrogate of a high-profile candidate was repeatedly offered for interviews on major national news. She is intelligent, witty, and a natural in front of the camera. She was the reigning Miss Black America, as a matter of fact. She never got chosen.
Black supporters of that candidate repeatedly offered to tell their stories to national media who went on safaris to that candidate’s hometown. They were never responded to, never published outside of local or social media.
The MSM’s chosen narrative, of course, was that the candidate had no black support. Putting any of those people on TV would have undermined that narrative.
I learned a lot during the primary…not all of it good or fun.
They’ve been caught exactly zero times doing this, do you see why?
Like 1% of Americans are aware of this. Like Unstuck Politics caught them, and some peeps on Twitter caught them. Let me know when their pals in the media call them out or like even 15% of Americans know this.
I don’t know. Our desired outcome, I suppose? In actual practice, not much.
After about June-ish, I saw how people reacted to black supporters online. It would have been writ large. It was with derision and disbelief, like they weren’t even real people. The erasure was frustrating and sad.
I still remember him being accused of posing a token black woman near him for a photo shoot. It was Nina Smith, his press secretary. Absolutely infuriating.
To be fair, this didn’t happen to only one candidate.
In journalism school I was taught to find the part of town with the biggest cross section of people (downtown somewhere with a major bus stop and white collar businesses nearby so your can get a sampling of everyone). Then you actually randomly stop people on the street.
But, you know, I was taught how to do actual journalism not bullshit propaganda.
It’s this.
And this too.
It’s a little less sinister than some think, is my guess. They think they’re getting a fair representation, because the world they “know” is determined by what they read and discuss with colleagues.
I have an idea but it needs some fleshing out and my morals are complicating it. But some form of push polls where respondents can agree to be available for interviews combined with PR outreach to journalists with the results of the polls could generate coverage. Making it a real gig with income would probably require consulting for politicians and offering it as a service to them, but that makes the job way harder because we lose our veil of neutrality.
That narrative was driven by the polls. Pete needed to poll better among black voters, which would have been newsworthy, and then that surrogate may have been chosen to tell that narrative. Alternatively he could have hired a pollster to poll that result, leaked it, tried to feed that narrative and hope it led to that result.
I do think that surrogate deserved to get equal airtime to his other surrogates, so I’m not absolving the media so much as offering ideas on how to work the ref.
FWIW my opinion is that Pete had a lot of good policies for black voters, but a bad track record in South Bend on issues of race that was not originally his fault, but which was compounded by his handling and additional bad luck.
He obviously knew he was running a couple years out and did a poor job building up that support. I’d say the same of Bernie, as well, in similar ways.
BTW to this day I’m stunned his campaign didn’t do a better job on this exact thing. I thought his campaign manager was really sharp based on her reputation and would have expected her to make this a huge priority. I’ve actually wondered if there were internal issues and disagreement on this strategy.
I always expected Pete to do well in Iowa, then have trouble in NH (Bernie and Liz), and thus need a big showing in SC/NV.
But he was also obviously playing the long game and he’ll likely get another crack at it.
I don’t believe there’s such a thing as natural progress in these things. One of my consistent criticism of Democrats is that they have in their mind an idea of how the media is supposed to act and passively wait for that to happen. You have to take things and not wait for them to come your way.
If Pete could have trotted out a black ex-boyfriend who still supported him enthusiastically, maybe that would have been the sort of sideshow that attracted attention. If the MSM wants to craft a narrative of gay-black tension, the ideal surrogate is a black (openly) gay person who can tell an internal story of that tension. If Buttigieg was intent on being the candidate who happened to be gay and keep his sexual orientation in the background, that may have hampered him. I apologize if there were any such surrogates, but a quick look through a list of endorsements didn’t seem to have anyone who fits that description.
The argument is circular, though. Anytime someone new comes on the scene, they poll badly with certain groups because those groups don’t know them.
So the narrative is formed, which then helps drive the polls, and that enforces the narrative, etc. The trouble right now is the media often does exactly what chads said, which is discard anything that contradicts the established narrative, which helps exacerbate the issue.
I think the same thing happened to Bernie and Warren, tbh, though I have no inner knowledge of their campaigns or surrogates.
Older religious blacks disliking gays was a pretty predictable narrative, though. You really need to be pushing your narrative before you even announce that you are running for president.
Yeah I mean I feel like this is a “You want it to be one way,” situation. I want it to be one way, too… But it’s not the way we want it to be, it’s the other way.
I know there isn’t a Hunter Biden thread and there probably isn’t a need for one.
Our favorite Tucker had a 17 minute interview with Tony Bobulinski tonight, and already the usual suspects* on twitter are wringing their hands about how the mainstream media just isnt covering this terribly important corruption story zomg.