There's a Travis joke in there somewhere but it wouldn't be particularly good and I can't be bothered to try.
Election results discussion thread (and sadly the inevitable aftermath)
- Thread starter Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)
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Which they did. That's Trump's entire problem with them.
What's the media supposed to do? Report on Trump scamming students out of their money but then hastily put a disclaimer on screen with ''Oh but he's just as trustworthy of anyone else!''. Its Trump himself who insist on lying, cheating and fostering corruption as much as he does. And when he does that the image of him can't be anything other then pitch black without becoming completely disingenuous.
You're welcome to find a politician with more scandals to their name, more court cases, more documented lies and more anti democratic sentiments. Perhaps there are politicians every bit as bad as Trump on some of these matters, but likely not all at once and they likely do a far better job of disguising that.
Well that explains a lot.
I doubt I would fall for such crass propaganda, because Obama wasn't a compulsive liar with decades of cheating, lying, sexual assault, racism, etc. against his name before he even stepped up into office, and didn't conduct himself in that matter whilst in office either. It's not that I claim to be immune to influence by the media. But I do not believe it has the ability to turn lead into gold or gold into lead in terms of opinion. Particularly in my case, as I am healthily skeptical about the media, and secondly that I consume quite a range of media from left to right, both mainstream and alternative, and have done for thirty years.
The torrent of animosity towards Trump reflects several things, but some of them are simply that he was always unfit for office. He was unfit before he started and never bothered making himself fit. Trump's support reflects a real problem the USA faces: that people are fed up with the cosy, business- and special interest-orientated neoliberal consensus offered by the two main parties, and he effectively tapped into that frustration. He is going to be followed, almost certainly by someone who has seen the "gap in the market" he exploited, but will probably have the work ethic, political savvy, coherent vision and lack of derangement to effectively turn some of it into policy. That person will be a Republican, partly because the breakthrough has already been made there, and partly because the Republicans need to realign what their party represents anyway: they've won the popular vote in a presidential election only once since 1988, so they really need to change tack and Trump has offered them a direction.
Let's just assume that they did. Choosing to only report certain facts that damage a person's reputation, while choosing not to report other facts that elevate a person's reputation is obviously unethical, right?
It's like when politicians are running for something, and they do a smear campaign against the other person. They try to paint the other person in a bad light. Can you trust that? Can you trust what the political and ideological opposition says about the opponent? Not really, right?
It's like that, except in this case, the political opposition is the entirety of the mainstream media.
Here's a recent example: Melissa Carone "seeming" drunk.
That's not a fact, that's an opinion, but the media is happy to spread that around in order to discredit her. Why do you think that is?
Be unbiased as possible.
I have only seen one view of Trump from the media, and it is always negative. That's primarily why I don't trust it. Nobody can be that bad.
Even Hitler is viewed with more balance than Trump is being viewed now.
If you google "Nice things about Hitler", you'll probably find more things of greater impact than if you googled "Nice things about Trump". Even if you did, someone who is wholly indoctrinated would probably start mentally belittling and hand-waving Trump's accomplishments, or discrediting what they find as being from a right-wing site.
Can you name 2 good things that Trump has done?
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And now the news:
The link goes to this:
Simple tests for the extent of vote fraud with absentee and provisional ballots in the 2020 US presidential election
This study reports three tests measuring vote fraud in the 2020 US presidential election, although they provide inconsistent evidence. To isolate the impact of
papers.ssrn.com
A Simple Test for the Extent of Vote Fraud with Absentee Ballots in the 2020 Presidential Election: Georgia and Pennsylvania Data by John R. Lott of the US Department of Justice
Abstract:
Is the mainstream media covering this?
No?
Didn't think so.
Ivanka
covfefe
One could eat a pile of shit and likely come across an undigested ort or two with some nutritional value, that doesn't make the pile of shit any less a bad meal.
Which means that if a candidate lies demonstratively more then any others, has a long history of corruption and generally behaves incompetently they should report on that and not try to sugar coat it and assure everyone he's a valid choice. Unbiased does not mean claiming every politician is equally viable.
Is there anything to elevate someone's reputation when they set up a fraudulent charity though? Is there a way to to elevate someone's reputation when it comes to light when he's not been paying his workers, enriches himself on tax payer money and acts as if he's above the law? Its not like Trump ever gave any indication that he's seen the light and has grown ashamed at his past conduct.
If you're a reporter and you see a demagogue claiming to fight for the common man while also having a history of conning the common man out of their money then it would be unethical not to bring up that the demagogue is attempting to deceive the common man.
Its not exactly the media's fault that Trump's keep doing negative things. If you keep lying, cheating, behaving like an undemocratic authoritarian and fostering extreme corruption then your press simply is going to be negative. The solution to that problem would be to stop doing all those negative things.
Yes. Well, it's more complex than that.
Helping push through the criminal justice reform was almost certainly the big highlight. His other really big achievement was the tax cuts, although I do not personally think this that was a good idea, and it failed to supercharge the economy as Trump had used as a public justification. Really, most of the stuff has been okay - keeping things ticking over fine - and some times more successfully than others. So there have been positives: he renegotiated NAFTA to a minor benefit to the USA, initiatives against the drug abuse epidemic, and some other medical concerns, he was overseeing things when ISIS was finally crushed. I think the USA was right to confront China more forcefully, but I'm bemused by the grounds Trump justified doing so and unconvinced by how effective he's been.
I might be inclined to ask are how much Trump really contributed to a lot of these initiatives or whether his cabinet basically did the work for him and he just signed it off and/or took credit where necessary, but there are worse things than letting your minions get on with the job.
Whether or not a candidate lies demonstratively more than any others is for the media to decide, because they are the one who count the lies.
I dunno, was Obama's reputation turned to mud after this?
This is circular logic.
> Trump is bad
>Why do you think so?
> Because the media says Trump is bad?
>Why do they think so?
> Because Trump keeps doing bad things.
>Says who?
> The media
Weird how I get an articles about how Trump eats his steak wrong and how he offered NBA champions McDonald's due to the government shutdown shoved in my face, but I don't hear about these two things unless I deliberately search for them.
Almost as if there's some kind of media bias??!!?!
Do you not understand the difference between a charity and a political campaign?
If that were the logic being used, sure. It's not though.
Does your inability to read what others actually post lead to your inability to understand others' point of view?
Or does your inability to understand others have different points of view lead to you not actually read others' posts?
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I can legitimately say repealing the individual mandate was a good move on his part. Likely motivated poorly, but a good call is a good call.
Not really. I mean Trump university wasn't bad because the media said it was bad. It was a real scandal that actually happened and there's only one way that makes Trump look: bad.
Same with Trump golfing on his own properties and channeling government money to his own organisations while doing so. It doesn't matter what the media says about it. It being corrupt is the only possible conclusion.
When the media reports on Trump doing things that make him bad, its generally in response to things he actually did.
"Scandal" is a word for when the media attacks something.
Did the courts ever find anything wrong with Trump U? No, they didn't he settled out of court and the terms of his settlement meant he admitted no wrongdoing. The same courts you trust in to tell you that election fraud didn't happen.
So all it is is bad optics.
Oh, because no other president ever golfed. Golfing = corruption, got it.
So we should just uncritically believe every smear campaign done by every candidate ever?
No, it's probably more a combination of you not using the right search terms, and that what search engines send your way reflects both general social trends and what your personal search history suggests you are interested in (plus a dash of whatever the latest iteration of their bloody algorithm has screwed up). I recommend you read a more specialist, heavyweight news organ to avoid the worst tittle-tattle. I quite like The Economist, for instance - although a substantial of it is (unsurprisingly) economics that I have limited interest in, and it's pay to read.
In many ways, of course, media can be trivial because that's what people want to watch and read and media is a business that earns money by showing people what they want. The way that news media has started covering social media (which is particularly trivial) is because what gets 42 million hits on Twitter gives immediate indication about what people are interested in. And if it's the cheap humour of a cat that vomits every time it sees a photo of Donald Trump, there's a news article on a cat that vomits when it sees Donald Trump. People who care and want to seriously know about politics are the minority. Not least because the business of government is boring, complicated, and hard to understand stuff without investing time and effort most people don't want to spend. In the UK, the combined circulation figures of the broadsheets (i.e. the supposedly respectable, serious newspapers) is less than the single most popular tabloid, which has about much useful content on politics as a 4-year-old child has to say about astrophysics ("Ooh, the stars are twinkly!"). Our societies have the media that their people want to pay for.
Media are thus inherently biased, because they represent the niches in the market for various demographic groups, and so want to tell them what they want to hear. Mainstream media are mostly aimed towards the wealthier half of the country, because they are the people with the money that advertisers pay most to reach. Fox claims conservatism and MSNBC caters more to liberals. CNN is slightly odd in that it actually aims at a very neutral, middle position despite its viewership being very similar to MSNBC's. Unsurprisingly, CNN is also struggling in the viewer ratings, because as the USA becomes more polarised it's therefore chasing a declining demographic group. But that's the thing. As long as you know what media is trying to do and who it wants to speak to, it's easy to compensate for bias. Mostly, it's just a case of putting some time and effort in, and who wants to do that in a world with a zillion cute pet videos?
That's the thing, you have to go hunt and search for it. It's not front page news. It's not the headlines that are, like I said, shoved in your face. The articles about how Trump eats his steak, and how he ordered McDonalds, are.
Of course you could find that stuff out if you watched c-span or subscribed to some source dedicated to Capitol Hill, but that's not the mainstream media, which is my point. The MSM as a much greater reach and influences a lot more people.
Then we are in total agreement.
I think a president that has spent over a fifth of the days of his presidency - more than one a week - going on golf trips can, at minimum, be suspected of possibly not working that hard. To put it in context, Trump golfed one and a half times a week. Obama, about one a half times per fortnight. GWB played frequently (about fortnightly?) in his early years, but stopped because he was concerned about how it was making him look.
Mostly, I just hate golf as a leisure pursuit optimistically termed a sport, overwhlemingly colonised by the worst middle to upper-middle class managerial-level wankers. Sorry to any of you out there who love golf. I just fucking hate it in every way, from the land usage, to the resource waste keeping them pretty for the socioeconomic elites, to the fact it's just about the world's dullest spectator "sport". I mean Christ, you don't even really compete against other people in any normal sporting way. It's basically just a solo exercise where you pretty much play by yourself, just that someone tots some numbers up at the end and calls one of them playing on the same day a winner.
In terms of corruption, if he's paying for it himself, who cares? However, if he or the inevitable coterie of security agents, staff etc. are expected to pay stuff at his own golf courses out of the public purse, one could argue that legitimately raises some awkward questions.
If you want to say that he's a worse president because he spends more time on leisure activities compared to other presidents, fine, but we should keep it in perspective. That alone doesn't that he's corrupt, as Hades put it. Nobody is perfect. Not everyone can be #1 in all things.
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No indeed. Corruption is things like pressuring a foreign leader to investigate your political rivals, engaging in obstruction of justice, and directing government activities and foreign government payments to your private businesses, which were not been safely firewalled from government business by handing over to sufficiently independent administration in the first place.
There are all sorts of things we don't know details on - look through and there are all sorts of things going on with Qatari investments in Trump properties, and it just so happens Trump has been very supportive of Qatar in its regional disputes with Saudi Arabia. You don't see a lot of that on the front pages, either. To be fair, I don't think this per se necessarily means corruption, but it is absolutely the sort of thing that should make us pause for reflection.
And well short of conventional corruption but well in line with the "swamp" Trump claimed he wanted to drain, Trump has his own cabal of enthusiastic, big business donors who likewise have been rewarded with very friendly use of executive power in terms of regulations and so on helpful to their industries. What a lot of people fail to notice is that whilst many of the normal big corporate hitters have been tepid about Trump, it's not stopped a huge number of often less known billionaires and major industries chucking their lobbying weight around.
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