- Mar 13, 2020
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There's merit to the argument that the media is complicit in all this considering they directly profit from it. I wish more people would take classes to learn about how mass media / propaganda operates.Exactly.
Literally every politician does this across every level of government, and has since the genesis of the 24-hour news cycle. It's not even a "politics" thing, that's an "anything newsworthy" thing. Obama fucking did that too.
This is why I give you shit about "orange man bad", you're singling out that Trump does something universal and trying to act like it's some unique, unprecedented, especially dangerous, or even noteworthy at all, thing. That's BEC level shit right there. If Trump dropped a toilet-clogger in Mar-a-Lago, would you be in here talking about how Trump's trying to single-handedly destroy Palm Beach's sewage treatment system?
At some point you just gotta realize, that's how politics works in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and let it the fuck go. That's not manipulating the media, that's everyday operation.
That's not Trump manipulating the media, that's the media manipulating you. Most of these stories are about alphabet agency deregulation in which the MNC's that own the media -- and their advertisers -- have a vested interest in not reporting. Between Comcast, AT&T, and the FANG's which collectively control over half all news media consumed by Americans, do you think they were gonna report on net neutrality deregulation when they could have instead distracted the public with "covfefe"?
And even if they did report it, it's mostly boring administrative law shit that doesn't drive ratings, when "lol orange man bad" topical/fluff bullshit brings in the stupids in record numbers. These are for-profit companies, what do you think's going to be the bigger crowd-pleaser: an investigative story about Chevron deference in the Trump era and its impact on juridical relief from EPA deregulation, or goddamn Maddow yowling like a cat in heat about whether or not borscht is detectable in Trump's stool samples?
Goes right back to Woodward dropping this shit in September, seven months after it might have saved lives in the earliest parts of the pandemic. He's not trying to inform the public or advance the cause of public health, he's trying to sell a goddamn book. Because the news media isn't a poor, innocent, bystander led about the nose by Trump in all this as you would claim, they're an active participant and beneficiary of it
Trump plays the media like a fiddle and he knows it and he benefits from it. He knows saying all this crazy shit is going to get him media attention and they give it to him on a silver platter every day. It's so much that people are in fact becoming desensitized to it and why, I think personally, he keeps getting away with all the stupid shit he does, because the media does indeed make a huff about every little thing he does.
Heck, for as much as outlets like CNN don't want Trump to win the next election, 99% of their coverage is focused on him and not Biden. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but I distinctly remember not at all being surprised when he won just due to the media coverage he got (yes, I know popular vote, etc).
Anyways, as someone that really cares about journalism, I'm utterly dismayed at the current state of things and that journalism has become more about individual personalities and injecting a "voice" into the news rather than just reporting the facts.
Someone in games media a couple years ago defended adding their own thoughts into each news story by saying it gave their writers a "voice" and that's stuck with me since as something that's truly screwed up journalism as a whole. It sucks.