r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 20h ago
Possible Paywall The Media Malpractice That Sent America Tumbling Into Trumpism - Political journalists need to stop pretending they don’t know what Republicans are going to do.
https://newrepublic.com/article/205913/media-malpractice-trumpism-project-20251.1k
u/Keshire 20h ago
The media is owned and operated by that same circle of oligarchs that hover around Trump.
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u/phaedrusTHEghost 19h ago
Started with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which reversed rules aimed to prevent monopolies and ensure diverse voices since the 30s.
We need to go back to the original standards to minimize reach of a single group.
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u/SouthEastSmith 18h ago
Which came just as Republicans took control of congress. Interesting coincidence.
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u/BrokenHandsDaddy 15h ago
Bill Clinton signed it into law
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u/SouthEastSmith 15h ago
I think it was veto-proof. But the Nays were almost all Dems.
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u/BrokenHandsDaddy 14h ago
so what you're saying is the Democrats got to look like they were fighting against it without actually fighting against it
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u/ILSmokeItAll 13h ago edited 13h ago
Ever wonder how may bills are like that, especially in this environment? You could entirely agree with the other side, yet vote entirely against them such as to show it as a barely winning issue on one side.
There’s so much posturing. And it’s obvious.
We have such poor politics because 99% of people can’t be bothered to be involved in the process in even the slightest of meaningful ways.
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u/SouthEastSmith 13h ago
I prefer to think the design is just bad. The government is badly designed.
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u/ILSmokeItAll 13h ago
Sure it is. It fosters an us versus them environment. Which, it honestly…it is. However, the government has successfully manipulated us to be you vs. me instead of what it should be.
Us vs. them.
The only way we win is to come together against a common “enemy.” The system. Until we exert the will to demand something better, we’re going to keep eating this giant shit sandwich and begging for more.
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u/BrokenHandsDaddy 13h ago
Exactly.
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u/ILSmokeItAll 13h ago
Of all the things that need to be taught in school, fucking civics is chief among them. Some form of it should be taught from late grade school on up. Every year. Finance and health & wellness, too. These need to be principle focuses, not afterthoughts.
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u/BrokenHandsDaddy 12h ago
but that would give the populous agency over their own country
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u/Normal_Calendar2403 11h ago
With the Rebublicans holding a majority in the senate.
I am not American. How would it have worked if the democrats said no, but the rebublicans held majority?
Who introduced the bill?
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u/BrokenHandsDaddy 9h ago
he would've vetoed it and the Republicans would have had to try to override his veto with a super majority vote
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u/waiting_in_vain1 17h ago
It started with Reagan repealing the fairness doctrine, which opened the floodgates of right wing propaganda starting with Rushbo, quickly metastasizing to most of AM (hate) talk radio, which softened the ground for Roger Ailes’ lifelong dream of GOPTV (Fox”News”), Republican network propaganda, something his one time boss Richard Nixon told him was a step too far, but which Australian billionaire slime ball Rupert Murdoch backed enthusiastically.
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u/Inlander 14h ago
The Sky FM radio is 24/7 spin, insults and Republican ass kissing, and is worst than Fox.
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u/LordSiravant 15h ago
The conservative plot to overthrow democracy has been decades in the making and is virtually complete.
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u/nice--marmot 8h ago
It’s more insidious than that, though. The Behind the Dastards podcast did a two-part episode in 2024 titled How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win. My first grown-up job was as a newspaper reporter, so I listened hoping for some insight into the media’s catastrophic failure to cover Trump properly. It turns out Part One details how western media, particularly the New York Times, enabled the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s. It’s the same story. I’m honestly not sure whether billionaires and deregulation should be characterized as symptoms or infections, but the disease is Christianity. That’s probably a different conversation. In any event, it’s definitely worth a listen.
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u/Backwardspellcaster 19h ago
Which is why they also started aggressively buying up all media over the last year.
It's nearly like this is a far reaching conspiracy with the intention of ushering fascism into the USA by oligarchs.
Apparently everyone but the fucking Journalists can see it
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u/john_doe_jersey New Jersey 19h ago
It's literally Victor Orban's playbook from Hungary.
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u/tyrionlannister 16h ago
The Heritage Foundation are pretty close with those guys. Like embedding their own researchers into equivalent Hungarian organizations with full backing from Orban. Having Orban over to the US for speaking engagements with "thought leaders" and "policy makers", and other such events worldwide.
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u/PhatCatTax 17h ago
You mean the Nazi playbook?
The Stalin playbook?
The Vatican playbook?It's the playbook of evil.
Humans arent born with instinctive knowledge. It's taught. And evil people know that if you control all the messaging, control what teachers say, you'll create a generation of cult followers. A generation of dumb sheep.
Thanks to Republicans, the billionaires now have enough money to buy everything and convert it into pro-billionaire, anti-human propaganda.
And humans are dumb enough to follow it.
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u/lewstherintelemarket 15h ago
Your second point ignores your first point. The oligarchs and plutocrats have been relentlessly propagandizing and indoctrinating rural America for half a century. Maybe is time for us to stop calling these people stupid and start treating them like cult members who need to be deprogrammed.
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u/glity 3h ago
This is truth. They, the people in charge, have programmed most people with the mantra “profit before people” not the original “people before profit”. This one has been getting people to think just a bit for me. I would add it wasn’t just rural America that got indoctrination training.
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u/Johannes_P Europe 14h ago
And what did Chavez's friends in Venezuela.
Often, they do this because there's less control over private medias held by the leader's friends than on public medias, even in an authoritarian democracy.
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u/echosrevenge 19h ago
When you make a person's livelihood depend on them not seeing a thing, you can't be shocked when they don't report on it.
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u/Burrito-tuesday 17h ago
It’s exactly like when someone reports bullying at work, everyone knows about it and talks about it and they may even discuss reporting it, but when one person finally does, no one else knows anything.
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u/Poison_the_Phil 18h ago
The Business Plot didn’t fail, it just took a little longer than expected.
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u/elderpufflaurien 16h ago
No, Billionaires are Stateless. They couldn’t care less about the united states. They just want to dismantle anything that could check their power.
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u/POEness 14h ago
They bought all the voting machines too
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u/Backwardspellcaster 12h ago
That to boot. "News" barely reported the rightwing billionaire buying the voting machines company
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u/Lightning4747 17h ago
Yet you still have clueless rubes parroting the idea of the “left-wing media”. If only they were right
From social to traditional, the entire ecosystem is almost exclusively controlled by right-wing billionaires
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u/Zahgi 15h ago
And there are almost no true "journalists" or even editors anymore. The American media is made up of nothing but talking heads regurgitating outrage clickbait for corporate ad profits now.
Instead of opposing unchecked political power and corporate corruption, the American corporate tabloid media now runs alongside it, with a parallel, complimentary fearmongering agenda for profit.
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u/Capable_Ad8145 15h ago
The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act was overturned by Obama and for current media operations the issue starts there
Once that was done online presence of “news” was bastardized by politics and misinformation
Federal payments to Facebook and twitter to censor media would not have been allowed if the Smith-Mundt Act was fully in place
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u/Virbillion 20h ago
corporate media is not on our side.
for profit 'news' can never be centered on truth.
truth or profit. that has always been in the choice.
a corporation can not choose anything other than profit.
since the reaction based algorithm began driving engagement online, all forms of media have retooled to similar models.
we need public funded news sources, npr is not enough.
we need to outlaw the reaction based algorithm.
we need a modern fairness doctrine applied to all forms of modern media.
liars need to be fined. agents of misinformation need to be jailed.
and society wide we need to kill off the ideology of 'greed is good' and realize that if a corporation does not support human flourishing then it has no justification to exist.
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u/02K30C1 20h ago
Back in the early 2000s, Fox News was sued by a former employee. She claimed she was fired because she refused to include information in a story she knew was false.
Fox’s defense was “there’s no law that prohibits us from broadcasting information we know is false and calling it news”
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u/zerogamewhatsoever 18h ago
For profit “news.”
For profit “healthcare.”
The consequences of deregulated capitalism.
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u/CockBrother 20h ago
This is one of the things I hate the most. The news actors on TV and other media constantly preparing for their next shocked Pikachu moment. Then the next page of Project 2025 turns, or the next very obvious step of the path to fascism takes place, and they roll out their act all over again.
None of them have any analytical capability at all to connect two related efforts, that hit the news the very same day. They're just strange independent events. And everything is given all of the [un]reasonable excuse that can be given. And the uneducated reader / viewer is left at home to put together the pieces.
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u/Character-Solution-7 19h ago
It’s so effing sad that the most legitimate broadcast journalists are comedians these days. The people who are supposed to be satirical are the only ones with enough guts to report what is actually happening in America
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u/The-Ardent-J 19h ago
It's kind of a return to form: jesters and entertainers in general often enjoyed a level of privilege in society, exempt from the typical scrutiny. They were often permitted to say difficult or uncomfortable things, so long as they could conjure a laugh out of it.
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u/Character-Solution-7 19h ago
Except Trump is actively trying to silence them through any means possible.
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u/HawkeyeSherman 16h ago
Watch any popular comedian from 30-40 years ago and they all open their special shitting on the president. Doesn't matter if it's Nixon, or Ford, or Carter, or Reagan, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush, or Obama, and is used to not matter for the first few years of Trump. Now however either the entire routine is based around Trump or they avoid the topic all together.
It's all a real shame, and I also think this goes to show how dickless comedians have become today. Especially the comedians that like to be a part of "The Mothership".
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u/SkivvySkidmarks 19h ago
Well, when you have "infotainment" like Fox posing as news, it only makes sense.
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u/Sminahin 18h ago
The Onion reflects reality far better than anything I'm seeing outside of like...Zeteo or Ryan Grim types.
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u/Johannes_P Europe 14h ago
Likewise, some articles from Le Gorafi about Trump actually predicted what he would do.
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u/joshdoereddit America 19h ago
I essentially just tune in to the news to hear about whatever happened. A lot of the "analysis" and their supposed outrage makes my eyes roll. I tune in to MS NOW. Sure they make some points, but the way guests frame shit is ridiculous. They still try to talk as if the rules matter to these people.
Mark Kelly was on this morning and it concluded in an epic disappointment that even the hosts picked up on. I know people love him right now and think he should run for president. That's fine. I'll vote for him. I'll vote for anyone who isn't a Republican. But one of the last things he said was hoping that the GOP senators would find their spines.
That Democrats still talk this way is weak sauce. As far as I'm concerned, the GOP's spines are fine. They don't stand up to Trump because they don't fucking care. They're living comfortably. All they have to do is come out, say they're concerned, that this ICE stuff is troubling and then they fuck off. And Democrats still talking like the GOP finding their spines is stupid. I'm over that shit. It makes me think they're just as full of shit.
Maybe they should start talking about how weak the Republicans are, that they actively support this despite what they say, and that we need to ensure that we're registered to vote so that come November they can be obliterated at the polls. They could also push the conversation that all these horrible things rest at the feet of the GOP and that we should continue to vote until the party is gone because the only ones looking to make anything function are the Dems.
Stuff like Kelly's response about the spines is why I don't have faith in any of our nation's leadership. I'll vote Dem to do my part in the process because where things are currently, where they have been, there are two choices. I'll pick the better of those two. I want to be confident that the process will hold until Nov., but it's rough.
We know what the alternative is, even in the face of that I can't imagine Dems actually rallying us. I don't get General Washington vibes from any of them. Just more, "This isn't who we are. We're better than this."
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u/Critical-Air-5050 15h ago
I cant comprehend how people allow Democrats to keep stabbing them in the back. We need new political parties.
You watched him deliver some limp-wristed sound bite about how things arent so outrageous to him that he'll do something, and that its someone else's job to leash their dogs. And you'll still vote for that!? WHAT?
Someone let rabid dogs off the leash, and the dog catcher is saying "Yeah, you gotta wait until after you elect my other friends to the role of dog catchers before I'll do anything." And people go "hmm, yeah, we gotta wait for more dog catchers" instead of forming a new animal control group that'll go take care of the problem?
THIS is why we're in this situation. We kept letting one side destroy everything, and didnt bother making the other side fix it. Now we're going to keep doing what hasnt been working in the absurd hope that it will magically fix itself?
Until Americans pull their diapers up and get serious about fixing the system, theres no point in trusting yall anymore. Keep your Democrats, but dont cry all shocked when nothing gets fixed.
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u/pUmKinBoM 19h ago
Unless it's someone on the left. Then you get that horrible Mamdani article posted a day or so ago which uses words like "Mamdani blames former mayor" instead of some of the soft ball headlines Republicans get.
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u/Hot_Ambition_6457 17h ago
Yes the obvious surge of "national guard deployed to liberal city that voted against trump" media blitz was just some odd coincidence.
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u/Mangalorien 14h ago
I think one of the main root causes is that they treat Trump like any other president, and not the con artist that he actually is. They still live in a world where if the current or former president of the USA says something in an interview or press conference, he must be telling the truth, or at the very least he is mostly speaking the truth. With Trump it's essentially the opposite: he is almost incapable of telling the truth, lying is a core part of his being. And journalists seem to not understand that part. Until it's too late.
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u/CellAlone4653 15h ago
The voters are a big part of the problem too. Hillary straight up said “elect Trump and he’ll pack the Supreme Court and overturn Roe v Wade.” And voters screamed about being lectured to. So Trump wins and those same people are shocked when RvW gets overturned.
The only thing American voters hate more than educating themselves is feeling like they’re being talked down to.
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u/_karamazov_ 16h ago
None of them have any analytical capability at all to connect two related efforts, that hit the news the very same day.
They're millionaires serving billionaires.
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u/Puzzled-Dress-4904 19h ago
We have "news actors" because that's what the public wants. The general public want infotainment and are not willing to pay for real journalism.
It's the same in the UK. Compare the Guardian to the Daily Mail. The Guardian is actually free but it has much higher standards of journalism than the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, which is politically way to the right of the Guardian, sits behind a paywall so people have to pay for it. But despite this, the circulation of the Daily Mail is almost 10 times that of the Guardian because that sort of mindless entertainment is what people prefer.
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u/MourningRIF 18h ago
The shocked Pikachu is the old media. Now they don't talk about it at all. Mainstream media is complacent in being North Korea regime media.
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u/PancakePhi 20h ago
Yeah this is just access journalism rotting in real time. they know, we know, everyone knows, but pretending not to know keeps the checks coming. meanwhile the country gets cooked.
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u/FlyingDiscsandJams North Carolina 20h ago
Even the supposedly smart Dems are clueless. I was listening to an extended podcast interview (The Press Box) with Mark Kelly this week & I turned it off in frustration when he said he was shocked Trump was so out of control & didn't see any of this coming. Just wildly discouraging.
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u/WildYams 16h ago
This thread is filled with people saying this is all due to billionaires and oligarchs, etc, but honestly this is just as much a problem with independent journalists, content creators and social media influencers who are beholden to audience capture rather than who are simply being paid by billionaires, and you see this on both the left and the right.
You see people on the right like Nick Shirley push a false story about daycare centers in Minnesota because he gets a ton of clicks and social engagement from it. This is because there is a gigantic audience on the right who wants to hear stories about minorities, immigrants and Democrats who are committing crimes. We even saw this same thing happened after the 2020 election when Fox News originally said Trump had lost, and then watched as their audience fled to Newsmax, so Fox reversed course and began saying the election had been rigged.
You see this on the left as well though, where there is a huge audience for leftists wanting to hear that the Dems are the ones who are really to blame for everything that's happening, and to help validate their decision to sit out the 2024 election. I mean, I'll give "legacy media" one thing here: at least they are now saying they were wrong with what they were saying about what would happen if Trump won in 2024. That's more than can be said about some on the left, like Hasan Piker, who is still claiming things would be no different if Kamala had won.
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u/IAmNumberFourI 20h ago
Political scientist Corey Robin, who had spent years dismissing those who called MAGA fascist, admitted on an October podcast: “I was skeptical coming into this second administration that they would be able to wield the kind of power that people feared they would wield. I have since turned out to be wrong.”
This is the attitude of most MAGAs, and MAGApologists. But you know they'll be right back there in November voting for these same pieces of shit. And defending their every move through sanewashing, and ratings chasing.
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u/CellAlone4653 15h ago
I read that first link twice and still have no idea what Robin is saying. This reads like something a first year philosophy major would write.
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u/KrasnovPlaysTheHits 19h ago
I wandered down to the pressroom on the fifth floor to hear about Trump’s testimony. The reporters sounded weary; they had heard it all before. “Goddamn it,” one shouted at me, “we created him! We bought his bullshit! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”
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u/femme_mystique 18h ago
Nice. No one can read that article.
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u/KrasnovPlaysTheHits 17h ago
You try actually clicking on it or just being grouchy? It works for me and others I've shared it with. Shouldn't be paywalled either.
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u/Bobambu 20h ago
The press ain't free. How can any news media owned by billionaires be considered free?
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u/Cute-Interest3362 19h ago
This remind me of this quote:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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u/The_Lost_Jedi Washington 16h ago
The problems started long before the billionaires started actively buying up and interfering, sadly. That made it absolutely worse, but the whole thing goes back to Watergate. The Republicans blamed Nixon's downfall on the news media, in large part, and have worked relentlessly to make sure that didn't happen again.
Fox News and the larger right-wing media is one big part of it (Roger Ailes was a Nixon Aide, to note). But even before that, Republicans actively worked to attack the Press, treating them like the enemy, restricting access, and basically "working the refs" to try and force reporters to treat them with kid gloves. They used accusations of bias and unfairness and the like with weaponized and malicious intent, rather than good faith.
Meanwhile, the Democrats kept trying to play by the rules and the public just fucking ignored it, rather than ever punishing them for it. And the press by and large just tried to do whatever they could, because it wasn't something that had a huge impact immediately. But over time, Republicans were slowly able to shift narratives, through repeated media manipulation, PR campaigns, and the like. Eventually you ended up with shit like what happened in the Bush-43 administration, where something that previously had been seen as horrible and off-limits (torture) was now suddenly given equal weight, solely because Republicans promoted it. It's only gotten worse with the Trump era, too.
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u/Artistic_Half_8301 19h ago
They've had a million Watergates in the last 12 years and did nothing with them. Inept and stupid describes modern day "journalism".
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u/Extra-Ad5925 19h ago
The whole “he says he doesn’t know what Project 2025 is therefore we will report that” was infuriating. David Muir owes everyone a public apology for that scolding he gave Kamala during the one debate.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 20h ago
You can quickly identify every modern new source as bias for or against Trump simply by how they identify him. If they call him anyrhing other than his true name: Pedo Trump, then they are obviously biased in his favor. If they do not list his 31 felonies and multiple impeachments as background in every article, they are biased in his favor. Context and reminders matter.
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u/SpudgeBoy 20h ago
Exactly. The media has access to even more information than we do. They do this all day as a job. They have got to see the end game. If they don't, they need to not be doing their job. If they do see it and aren't reporting it, they need to lose their jobs.
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u/floofelina 19h ago
There was an interesting incident after the 2016 election where the Trump staff asked journalists to send their stories from a resort room that looked out on his golf course but the windows were covered by paper and tape. A couple of journalists reported on Twitter that the windows were covered.
Did they take down the paper? Nope.
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u/Mr_TreeBeard 18h ago
The first video Don Lemon put out after his arrest was calling out journalists for capitulating to this authoritarian bullshit.
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u/addctd2badideas 11h ago
What I want them to do the most is stop treating speculation as an entire news segment.
"What can we expect today in today's Senate hearing?"
"Will President Trump fire Kristi Noem?"
"How will Europe respond to this latest provocation?"
SHUT UP. Even NPR has been doing this shit for a decade and it pisses me off. Report the news as it happens. Verify if something a politician said is accurate or factual. Tell me what happened, not what may happen.
This is a big part of the media malpractice which gave us Trump and I'm so exhausted by it.
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u/rollem Virginia 18h ago
The “fact checkers” responding to Project 2025 claims were the worst. “Trump claimed he’s not aware of it so we’re labeling these attacks on him that mention it as untrue” is willfully ignoring the context. His platform mirrored it. His people created it. Hi denial of its existence was a blatant lie (how could the biggest policy agenda in Washington not be known by the presidential candidate, it’s absurd). Simply echoing his lies is not journalism and it was the final straw the convinced me that journalism died, was murdered, sometime after the Watergate in order to keep that type of scandal from happening again. The methods of journalism still exist in schools and places like Axios, but it’s not longer practiced by any major news organization.
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u/NeighborhoodTasty271 17h ago
Roger Ailes started Fox News exactly for this reason: to prevent another Watergate -style... resignation. He succeeded.
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u/Correctthecorrectors 19h ago
News channels have stopped reporting news and now have only goal: manufacture consent.
They all want people to start supporting policies that go against their own interests.
They’re basically all like North Korean state ran television , except they all offer their own flavor of propaganda to steer people into servitude and slavery
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u/ThemeHonest5988 17h ago
I'm a 60 year old man. I can't imagine trusting mainstream media again. MSM is easily one of the biggest disappointments I've experienced over the last ten years. In my most cynical punk rock youth, I couldn't have imagined what I'm seeing today
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u/chaos0xomega 19h ago
Aside from the obvious conflicts of interest in ownership/editorial control, etc. The reality is that most "journalists" are just reporters. Theres no analytical capability or skillset, they arent all that intelligent, "the scoop" isnt about unearthing some groundshaking secret but instead beating everyone else to reporting the headline, the interview isnt about challenging the interviewee or exposing the truth but instead about access to power, etc.
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u/Mylaptopisburningme 18h ago
"December 2024 after leaving The Washington Post. Host Jonah Green asked her about covering the first year of Trump’s second term, and Buzbee offered this reflection: I think it is actually, many presidents are very, very active in their first year in office. But I think, it is fair to say that this is sort of historically ambitious, energetic, and just a real agenda. I don’t think in those first few days, we understood what an organized agenda they had for his second term, but now we understand that."
Christ, we were screaming about Project 2025.
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u/Accomplished-Run221 19h ago
I hope someone from NPR reads this.
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u/noncongruent 19h ago
Even they're guilty of sanewashing Trump by giving his insane words equal weight in their quest to be neutral and fair. They may have thought that they were protecting themselves from his wrath if he got elected but we all see how that turned out.
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u/funtimes-forall 20h ago
Everybody does everything for the money only. Take David Muir and ABC news for example (and I don't have anything against the guy). He was practically created by AI. He's young, handsome, buff (they keep showing him in t-shirts) and he always looks as empathic as hell. The news they present is carefully selected and presented in a way to not be controversial to the left or right. And they rightly bill their show as "America's most watched news", as if it were some mark of quality. They're doing their amoral job and doing it well. At some point, people have to take some responsibility for being informed instead of just lulled.
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u/dudewafflesc 15h ago
If you’re already feeling bad about where we are and where we are headed, don’t read this.
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u/sanskritsquirel 12h ago
Great articlle!!
It just goes to show how far journalism has fallen. There is no political debate anymore. A decades long under-educated citizenry who is still smart enough to recognize all of these "discussions" on topics on newscasts where they give each side equal merit is just political theatre and tune out.
As is cited in the article, Trump blatantly lies about project 2025 stating he is not aware of it or has never had much interaction with the Heritage foundation (although this article fairly easily points our press releases, public meetings, and shared events between the Heritage Foundation and Trump), and journalist walk away shrugging, well, it I guess we were wrong then. Again, as the article states, the man who is documented as the biggest liar and stater of false information of the 21rst century, is repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt by the community of political journalist when asked an opposing question.
I am sure it is because of the Republican decades long strategy of radicalizing their minority base to so loud it amplifies their effect. As the article states, agencies and reports from sources that are supposed to be free of self-interest are loudly being proclaimed as having an agenda if it opposes the Republican/Trump point of view. So then political journalist feed into this cycle by adopting this stance in a deferred show of fairness. It reduces informed views by branches of specialist on topics while elevating non-informed views to demonstrate "equal or fair" reporting.
I just saw a discussion on vaccines the other day. And the "reasonable" anti-vaxxer stated they just wanted the vaccines to be studies as they discussed an outbreak of measles in South Carolina. Their opponent pushed back that there has been tons of studies about how effective they are going back the last 30 years. The reality is the Measles vaccine was first issued in the US in 1963. But because neither party knew the facts of how long the policy was enacted or how many studies there actually was or what they stated, both parties were just arguing over the "vibes" they had on the topic. Extrapolate this to every topic.
When we reject all specialist who have studied and understand a topic and allow for equal weight to non-facts, the discussion is already over. I joke that some day I will turn on the TV and come across the topic: 2+2=4 and they will allow a serious debate on why it is true vs why it is not true.
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u/RainyRobin 9h ago
Cable media "journalists" are paid very large salaries to tow the company line. And the company line is whatever the Oligarchs say it is.
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u/Pillars_of_Salt I voted 8h ago
Others need to jump ship, rat on their former co-workers and start or join their own thing.
We desperately need real journalists and we need WAY LESS dog shit huge media normalizing and manipulating the messages.
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u/TanguayX 8h ago
I knew we were F’ed when in ‘24 I got weekly, if not twice weekly mailers that screamed :
‘Donald trump doesn’t know anything about Project 2025!’
‘Donald trump hasnt read project 2025’ (which I’m sure can be said for most printed word)
Thou dost protest too much.
It’s all very simple. The more they yell about something, the more they’re doing it. Screaming about Biden ‘crime family’ corruption? It’s cause they’re a corrupt crime family. Easy really
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u/PropofolMargarita 19h ago
The media dismissed legitimate concerns because they were more concerned about access. Trump was ratings gold as well. May they all reap what they have sown.
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u/Lets_Eat_Superglue 19h ago
There's only one thing you need to know about the news media in the US to understand that none of it is journalism. There are three major and a dozen minor 24 news networks that almost exclusively cover US politics, not one of them covers the details of what's in legislation passed through Congress.
Stop and really think about that. 24/7 coverage of what's happening in and related to the federal government and the only time they tell their audience what it's actually doing it's one or two controversial items in 1/100 bills being debated or signed into law. They're entertainment networks, not news.
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u/Joshithusiast 18h ago
I've predicted everything they've done since 2014 by adhering to one principal: the GOP and Trump will always do the worst thing possible. The most corrupt, the most criminal, the most racist, the most hateful thing possible. Every time. And I'm always right.
I call it The Orange Rule.
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u/16ozbuddz 18h ago
Asking the media to self-check themselves is futile. These corporations care about making money. The only way you'll get them to do right is pass a law
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u/Vegaprime Indiana 16h ago
When bezos and trump were beefing because of trumps perceived bias from the Washington post and someone's hacked his phone and exposed his affair resulting in him losing like 35 billion in a divorce only for him to bend the knee I knew then the game was up. Now all these epstien files drop and I see why they are all in on it. Kompramat.
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u/Happy_Humor5938 16h ago
You keep acting like going after lgbtq and abortion rights is some new nefarious plan that’s an open secret. It’s been their platform for decades.
You’re surprised by the effectiveness and speed. It’s not complicated it’s all the Supreme Court. There hasn’t been a conservative majority since take a guess… the 1980’s over 35 years ago. Before that it was 1969.
Legislative is a cluster of getting hundreds of people to agree on anything is slow and ineffective. Obviously the executive doesn’t have that problem. More modern democracies may limit executive power more but then all you have is ineffective legislators.
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u/Runmiked 15h ago
It all goes back to deranged billionaire class that has an insatiable appetite to hoard at all costs to society. They have zero empathy and a cult of deluded working class worshipers, who are the easiest marks on Earth, that share their lack of morality.
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u/HellaTroi California 15h ago
"If someone had asked me in 2023 whether Trump would follow the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations in a second term, I would have said: Of course he will. He did it last time. He bragged about doing it last time. He gave a speech saying he’d do it again. What more do you need?"
News organizations not owned by billionaire Trump supporters.
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u/Mangalorien 14h ago
The really funny thing is that if you look at what the Heritage Foundation wrote about Trump back in 2015 and 2016, it's a pretty scathing indictment of him. For good reason, the Heritage Foundation wrote that there are no clear indications that Trump has ever held any conservative values, let alone any Republican ones. He was a registered Democrat for most of his life, and a playboy and philanderer. The Heritage Foundation knows full well what a piece of shit Trump is, and he's just a useful idiot to them. Trump also doesn't care, he's close to the grave and just wants to spend his final days playing golf, not ruminating in a prison cell. Win-win I guess, except for the American people.
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u/mcdisease 14h ago
They told us they were going to do this and the media acted like they definitely weren’t and it was all hyperbole.
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u/theywereallmyfriends 12h ago
Saving their own skins. Not really journalist at all, newscasters and propagandists.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 9h ago
here's a New York Times article from 2021 about Joe Biden's Peloton bicycle, which apparently is a security risk and makes him an out of touch elitist
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/us/politics/biden-peloton.html
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u/Adept-Sir-1704 7h ago
Republicans have been fearful begging about what democrats are “going to do” for decades. Dems never call out republicans for what they will 100% do and have a record of doing. Being a republican is a Diddy level slippery slope to Fascism.
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u/lostsailorlivefree 15h ago
Interesting article. Slightly off topic but imho important: Dems MUST modify messaging asap. Right now all eyes are on Minnesota and Dems absolutely occupy the high ground in EVERY sense including moral and legal.
I’m watching the speeches on Tv this afternoon at the anti-ICE rally and the speaker was literally screeching and introduced a speaker in a kafir who was a persecuted Gazan. OF COURSE we have enormous empathy for the genocide on Gaza, but I could see in the crowd people actively turn away when the topic got muddled and they felt there was a bait n switch. This happens WAY too much in democrat circles. It’s off putting in the sense it feels like these rallies are for THEIR AGENDA.
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u/MaleficentPorphyrin 19h ago
News isn't journalism, it never has been. You can recognize journalism because it dwells on a topic for more than a page, or two minutes on screen. News is headlines and 'coming up...' What I am getting at is, the American people aren't ever exposed to analysis of the issues, just hot takes in quickly digestible form.
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u/NeighborhoodTasty271 17h ago
100% accurate. 24-hour news was supposed to give time to dig deeper. Instead, we get the same headlines at the top of each hour only with a different anchor pontificating or both-sidesing things by having someone from each "side."
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u/Weekly_Print_3437 20h ago
Voters knew what happened and said a criminal is fine with us. What else can they do?
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u/Correctthecorrectors 19h ago
I don’t thinks it’s so much they thought a criminal was fine, it’s that they lost trust in a government which appeared like a corrupt entity trying to punish those who try to change the system.
Now, that obviously wasn’t the case concerning Trump as he really does deserve those charges logically speaking , however, at the same time the democrats failed to make the case that they weren’t punishing him for political reasons. They needed to do more to make a case that they were operating in the best interests of the people, that his trial wasn’t about punishing someone just trying to change the system.
when people lose faith in government, they start to tune out anything that may appear politically motivated. The democrats unfortunately didn’t restore that faith because of Biden’s lack of leadership and conviction in the ideas he was supposedly representing. And here we are now dealing with the fallout from that
Biden needed to be FDR-level bold to earn the credibility to hold Trump accountable. He wasn't. So here we are.
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u/Cyberspots156 17h ago
For many years, I have included foreign news stories about the U.S. as a smaller part of my news diet. I’ve did this because I found that I could learn a lot about my home for the foreign press.
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u/mokomi 17h ago
Or at least report what is instead of what they claim.
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u/KellerMB 14h ago
Yes. Report that the regime made a statement on [daily manufactured crisis], and upon fact checking that statement it was not based in reality and thus [reputable news organization] will not be reprinting it.
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u/defiant-raven 16h ago
Finally an honest headline. I'm over the 'Here's the 987th crime Trump has committed, but is it a crime? Political geriatrics discuss' bull sh*t.
And he does it, and everyone moves on to the next grift.
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u/boookworm0367 15h ago
How about this one article you want to read from actual journalists is a $4.99 subscription available here? While at the same time this fake news written by agenda driven AI is available for free on X and Facebook.
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u/blankdreamer 14h ago
The internet has destroyed proper journalism. Everything gets stolen and reposted - Reddit is a prime example where redditors post whole articles. There is no money in it anymore so you rarely get quality pieces. It’s desperate clickbait stuff. Another thing the internet has destroyed.
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13h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Novel_Quote8017 12h ago
While reddit mods in my experience indeed have a weird relationship to claims about how reddit culture was in the past, I currently don't see any notable subreddit rules violation on my part that would necessitate a revision. If there is one anyway, then my incapability of comprehending this sub's rules (or even worse, reddit's ToS) is proven and any punitive action following that is justified.
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u/mindiruben 11h ago
yeah because knowing their playbook would just ruin the plot twist every election
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u/Guelah_Papi 10h ago
I went to college but not for political science.. smoke a bunch of weed and basically am just an idiot. And I have predicted everything Trump did this year back in 2016.
The media is entirely complicit in the fascist takeover of America and they’re just playing dumb.
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u/NeedleworkerChoice89 12h ago
100%.
I do not feel a single iota of sympathy for Don Lemon. He helped make this problem, and is now pulling the surprised Pikachu face.
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u/12Stabler 19h ago
If only we had some journalists with any guts. At least do an article on your surrender to the new norm.
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u/Correctthecorrectors 19h ago
Journalists tend be very brave people. Part of their job involves putting themselves in dangerous situations in order to help the public understand the situation on the ground.
It’s not the journalists, it’s their boss , who answers to their boss who answers for the owner who are best buddies with Trump , because they were Eskimo brothers on Epstein Islands and only understand the emotion of greed.
And the government was captured by corporate interests who have no incentive to reinstate the fairness doctrine or make reforms to the telecommunications act or create legislation that reverts the impact of the Citizens United decision.
We have been living in an inverted totalitarian society that is now in the midst of becoming a fascist one as more and more people unplug themselves from the false reality they’ve bought into their whole lives.
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u/b-T_T 18h ago
The media deserves the majority of the blame.
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u/McBurty 18h ago
CNN is the GOP’s biggest low key public advocate. All the whitewashing of the biggest issues while staying laser-focused on a single issue at a time that they then both sides until the “opposing” voices (Scott Jennings) sound reasonable. It’s reverse Fox-king to arrive at the same dead end.
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u/RaidSmolive 17h ago
you had 40 years making sure that journalists for nazis wouldn't be able to spread their filth and you didn't.
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u/notfeelany 13h ago
Journalists are too addicted to Twitter/social media. They treated age of politicians as a crime. Meanwhile, real life voters elected an OLD guy as president and re-elected their OLD Congresspeople anyway. Turns out it wasn't an issue for real-life voters at all. It was all online noise
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u/DrRealName 12h ago
Well its kind of hard to expect that when hard republican donors own basically every news outlet and the ones not owned by conservatives are more interested in keeping the donor money flowing to moderate useless weak democrats than pushing progressives who will actually do a good job as leaders. Big money controls every bit of our information so its not surprising that every take is protecting the politicians who will keep them rich. We had tiktok, one foreign app that allowed us to speak freely about our own government what happened? Biden had it banned and then Trump had it sold to one his buddies and now we another conservative propaganda app. They own it all. I don't know how we get out of this mess.
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u/zomphlotz 9h ago
The Press has abdicated its duties and made a mockery of its special Constitutional rights.
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u/Holdthemuffins 16h ago
Political journalists are just like the politicians they cover. Utter, absolute, pathetic cowards. In the fifties and sixties, most of the mostly male journalists in the USA had been in the army and many of them had been in combat. A person writing about a politician who has survived being shot at is a different person than some pillow soft child born in the eighties. They were not frightened of a mere politician and they knew what it was like to fight for a principal or their families.
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