Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
Spare me the outrage from the press, when the press is the entity that helped create this mess.
All this could have been avoided some 6 years ago if these clowns in the press did their goddamn jobs. Trump had a history of corruption going back decades. Between sexual assault cases, crooked business dealings,connections to the Russians as well as connections to the mafia, and everything in between. Rarely any of that came to light or was taken as seriously as it should have been. It was one free pass after another. They gave him endless air time because they loved those sweet, sweet ad-dollars. They considered him a joke candidate and never dove deep into his past finances or connections.
…And then it happened. He was actually elected. And that’s when it became serious.
Fuck every last one of these journalists who just sat back, let him slide, and just let it happened. Now they have the gall to talk about authoritarian-this, and fascism-that.
The press isn’t monolithic. This is one journalist stating their opinion and analysis of what the rest of the industry needs to focus on.
Came here to say this. There is some excellent, probing journalism out there. The problem is, it’s not very profitable
and in there lies the rub, everybody’s gotta fill their own ricebowl
It is far more monolithic than people realize. Folks think that only the Fox News if the world were being overly generous to Trump when he was just a candidate. The reality is that all mass market news outlets were.
I was a loooong time listener of NPR, a news outlets that most would probably consider as neutral or even left of center as you’ll get from US mass media. And I totally lost respect for them hearing them cover Trump as a candidate. Even now, I can just about hear Steve Inskeep chuckling after a Trump speech and simply never taking him as a serious candidate. This was someone who was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes. And these fucken reporters, who I had previously held in high regard, were just laughing at some of the insane antics that Donald was pulling. They were letting this shit slide while they would have roasted any other candidate if they had said the same thing.
And it’s not just NPR but any mass media news outlets acted the same way. That’s where the majority of Americans get their news and they were all doing the same things.
deleted by creator
I refuse to give NPR any more of my time anymore. I used to have a very long commute so for many years my radio was locked in on them all the time (the fact that music stations are shit these days doesn’t help either). Not any more. I’ll look at their stories if they come across my news feed these days, but they lost their credibility with how they handled Trump with kid gloves and they lost even more credibility with how they tried to sink Bidens agenda more recently.
Our news media gives one free pass after another to Republicans and holds Democrats to impossibly high standards.
In terms of what I listen to now, it’s a random assortment of what comes through my feed. I really haven’t had a good “home” for news in a while and I don’t like that, but reading multiple sources is probably the best move regardless since you can see how various outlets spin the same story. I’d love to find some slick app that compiled many outlets so I could read them on my tablet that filtered out the noise but I’ve yet to find that solution.
Conversely, I had to stop listening to NPR during donny’s tenure, they got so one sided it was disgusting. I’m a Democrat but I don’t need my news to hold my hand and tell me stories. Maybe it was extra bad becuase it’s the Seattle NPR station, but regardless I’ve not returned since.
It’s one thing to be Fox News and everybody knows what kind of bullshit you’re up to, it’s another to be a well of respected news station and try and pull the same kind of bs.
deleted by creator
It means I’m aware that my party has problems and I don’t want the media that I watch to skirt around it, these issues need to be addressed on all sides.
We are never going to heal as a nation and start improving if we keep insisting on only “bettering our half of the equation”, or only “attacking the bad half of the equation”. That’s not realistic. Not every criticism that Republicans have of democrats is invalid either.
deleted by creator
I had the opposite experience. I would listen to Mitch and others go spout blatant lies and receive absolutely no pushback from the hosts/journalists.
Thats problematic as well, agreed.
It isn’t, I totally agree, but there are far fewer independently owned news outlets and far fewer owners than ever. And that is part of the reason we are here.
But, yeah, this is one of a few journalists reporting on what is actually happening with regard to Republican authoritarianism.
If you can control who gets a job based on their background, (example: “no socialists, gays, or jews. off the record policy”) you dont even need to use invasive mind control techniques. Just have your writing teams sniff their own farts.
People like murdock control huge swaths of news outlets. The corprate office issues propaganda scripts that individuals are forced to put their name on (example, by reading it aloud).
The press shit on trump like no tomorrow. It didn’t stick because they’d spent years and years eroding their own legitimacy, not because they didn’t air bad things about Trump.
During 2016 election The New York Times published thousands of stories about Clinton email/Benghazi, not one on Trumps lifelong ties to NY/Russian mob. As if The New York Times wasn’t in a particularly knowledgeable position to report on 70 years of NYC construction & mob history
I mean - you’re just wrong https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/trump-russia
this came out may 2017, after trump was sworn in dipshit