Trump: Media is the enemy of the American people

Correct... and yet, the trump defenders still try to play "gotcha" with the so-called "fake media"...

 

So, since the President also offers his opinion/conclusions on Twitter - we shouldn't trust him?

 

The vast majority of US corporate media exists to defend the establishment. There are a small fraction of the jobs there used to be in journalism, and the jobs that exist are largely five or six large corporations with vast empires in different media from decades of consolidation, and those large corporations are without exception, subsidiaries of the powerful interests they are reporting about, including companies with ties to the federal government in industries like finance, defense, IT, and other services .

Furthermore, those jobs pay a LOT of money. Someone like Rachel Maddow or makes $7 million a year, or about $30k a workday. Sean Hannity makes $36 million a year. No one gets paid that to speak truth to power, and that power doesn't give two ***** which political party you support. It cares about creating shareholder value, and will continue to exploit everyone's prejudices to continue doing so.

I was a financial journalist at one point in my life, wrote for print and the web, had a weekly broadcast and interviewed African heads of state. I made about $30k before taxes my best year, or less than I paid in taxes doing IT work during the dot com bubble in California. It was once a working class job that was largely about holding the powerful to account, and it isn't anymore, largely because journalists can't afford to do that. What gives you job security now is not writing well-research exposés -- it's having access to powerful people. And one doesn't do that without creating a reputation for being a reliable stenographer for the official narratives of governments and corporations.

A good way of understanding this is sports journalism, because this was true long before all of this began to change for other kinds of news. ESPN and its analogues are largely full of asskissers because if you say things that upset the NBA or NFL or one of its stars, or even enough of a large enough fan base, you won't have a job very long. The ones that rise to the top generally praise the most popular teams and stars and give softball interviews. Does anyone recall anyone asking Kobe Bryant about his rape allegations? This is why people like Stephen A. Smith continue to get pay raises for repeating the banal talking points of casual observers with the voice of authority despite almost always being wrong about any predictions of the future -- much in the way Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama do.

The other comparison is the rise of the 24 hour news cycle. Keeping ratings up isn't about following more stories -- it's having talking heads, pundits, and paid "expert" guests comment about the news and make (often very wrong) predictions. In time that commentary finds a more specific audience -- this is why CNN and MSNBC had to pivot to keep up with the ratings FOX News was getting and began to purge voices that actually challenged official narratives. Voices like Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges or Ed Schultz or Sy Hersh have faded from mainstream news in the last two decades, not because they were wrong about events, but because they were right about things audiences (and especially management) didn't want to hear. There's no one left to hire them anymore so you'll only see them on counter-hegemonic broadcasters like Al Jazeera, France 24, Press TV, RT America, or Telesur and small websites.

So now your news is mostly cheerleading: for war, for hegemony, for Jeff Bezos, for Wall Street, for the status quo. They are there to assure you that everything is just fine, it's only Others that are the problem: those lazy Mexicans who are taking our jobs, those dastardly Russians who are using their mind control rays and fixing elections, and That Other Party who is on the wrong the side of the Culture War -- but never the abuses of government itself. There's a reason you don't see coffins draped in American flags unloaded from C-130s any more, or journalists on US TV investigating anything remotely critical of the wars the US are involved in, or the shady things its allies do. Those things were common in the Vietnam and Reagan eras, but THAT kind of outrage is simply not allowed on television any more.

Even in the case of Trump, criticism of actual policy, like his veto of a commendable bipartisan effort by Congress to end support of an authoritarian regime in an unpopular war takes second place to debunked conspiracy theories. And even if it is reported, it's not like you will see it's sponsors getting any air time to talk about these things. No one wants to talk to legislators like Bernie Sanders or Rand Paul or Ro Khanna or Tulsi Gabbard or Justin Amash on TV unless it is to discredit them as eccentric weirdos, or to make "that Other kooky Party that our viewers don't like" look bad, and never to highlight efforts they made together to do something morally right and politically unpopular with America's powers that be.

So yes, while Trump has yet to break character in his kayfabe faux-populist performance he is constantly proven right in his criticism of our shitty media and it works to his advantage, even if his own supporters in media are equally disingenuous. Trump is either literally Hitler or the the savior to all of America's ills, and that's what we are allowed to talk about and argue about. As long as no one pays any attention to what the government does to be increasingly abusive of the civil liberties of its own people and the sovereignty of other nations, we can safely point fingers at each other and scream "Nazi" and "Commie" and argue about abortion and guns and gender expression and religion.

As long as the ratings are good from a public demanding to be told what they want to hear, none of that has any real effect on the status quo or threatens the power of the people in charge. Nothing will ever change in any meaningful way for the better, and we deserve leaders like Donald Trump, because we are all responsible in our own way for creating him.

 

MSNBC host seemingly can't believe that no one interviewed seems to care about the Mueller report

 

I don't disagree with much of any of this. What I stated was narrow on purpose. I don't consider talk entertainment, tweets, opinion piece, propaganda, all those thing that dominate "the media" as journalism. Some discrimination is needed but too often generalization is all you get.

 

Eh. I don’t know how much the media is protecting the “establishment”. I’ve always believe the modern world is far too complicated to be controlled by cigar smoking men in dimly lit room.

Plus ratings/clicks/eyeballs = money.

 

give specific eg

 

Hmmm....call me crazy but I think WaPo is trying to push an agenda.

 

Since the newspaper (s) all reported the news of each I am not sure I understand the right wing opinion writers complaint. But if he is questioning the point of a WaP op-ed writers point... all he has to do is read any of cohete red's (and others) posts on D&D.

 

LOL... what a butthurt putz... though other than trump and possibly shs, would others have been invited?

 

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, "The Press Will Learn Nothing From the Russiagate Fiasco." An excerpt:

The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren’t there.

Reporters should be furious about being fed these red herrings. They should be outraged at all those people who urged them to publish the Steele report, which might have led to career-imperiling mistakes in print. They should be mad as hell at CIA chief Gina Haspel and the other unnamed officials who told them disclosing the name of already long-ago exposed government informant Stefan Halper would “risk lives.”

More than anything, reporters should be furious at the many sources close to the various investigations who (it now seems clear) must have known pretty early there were serious holes in many areas of this story, and that a lot of these “dots” were dead ends, but didn’t warn their press counterparts. For instance, the papers should be mad those who supposedly had misgivings about the Steele report didn’t warn them earlier.

But they’re not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money. Media companies earned boffo ratings while the Mueller probe still carried the drama of a potential spectacular ending, with blue-state audiences eating up all those “walls are closing in” hot takes.

This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls “underlying crime” make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we’re there, and the press is a big part of that picture.

News audiences were betrayed, and sooner or later, even the most virulently Trump-despising demographics will realize it and tune us out. The only way to reverse the damage is to own how big of a screw-up this was, but after the last three years, who would hold their breath waiting for that?​

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russiagate-fiasco-taibbi-news-media-826246/

 

But the reporting was accurate per the Mueller Report.....

 

I can tell this author didn't read the report and is making claims from the Barr "summary" and Donald's tweets. Pretty much every news story of any meetings and orders Trump gave were accurately reported.

 

Hopefully one of the kids will ask shs why she lies to the American public...

 

Why are those names highlighted? Farrakhan is pretty far right. He is firmly against almost all forms of welfare, government assistance. He favors the ability to buy guns, big on entrepreneurship and self-reliance. He wants lower taxes. Those are all extremely right positions. He goes further than most other ultra-conservatives on wanting to do away with welfare programs.

 

I'm not familiar with him, but based on your post, I don't understand why he was banned.

 

I think it is because he is antisemitic. That's not necessarily right wing though. Certainly there are far right groups that are antisemitic as well. There are also some in Europe that are generally left wing but also antisemitic. So I don't think that trait is a right-wing. But it would probably get a person banned from Facebook.

 

Gotcha.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/4671...tter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dwtwitter

WaPo Lumps In Farrakhan With 'Far-Right.' They Get Mocked Mercilessly.


Looks like even WaPo realized how stupid they were.

 

Facebook is a private company - glad to see they are banning the lying trolls - time to get back to truth mattering.

Those banned folks can get together and start their own community and stop mucking up others.

DD