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.
We need to hear from more experts on authoritarian movements and fewer pollsters and political strategists. We need journalists who’ll talk a lot less about who’s up or down and a lot more about the stakes — including Trump’s plans to dismantle the democratic norms that he calls “the administrative state,” to weaponize the criminal justice system, and to surrender the war against climate change — if the 45th president becomes the 47th. We need the media to see 2024 not as a traditional election, but as an effort to mobilize a mass movement that would undo democracy and splatter America with more blood like what was shed Saturday in Jacksonville. We need to understand that if the next 15 months remain the worst-covered election in U.S. history, it might also be the last.
Incredibly captivating article, but when you reach this final paragraph, you know with absolute and agonizing certainty that none of this will come to fruition. The mainstream media isn’t going to fix itself and this election will be covered, same as all the rest, as a horserace.
The mainstream media are corporations first and press/media second. They will only do the things that make them more money and 99.9% of the time that’s in direct opposition of what is good for any given situation.
I 110% do not expect the behavior to change. It’s money we’re discussing and shitty gossip trash talking/ political sports casting is what makes media money so it’s what they’ll keep doing. :(
It is, and will always be- capitalism. When everything is for profit, lies become commodities. This system can work, until there is a crisis that markets can’t absorb. Climate change cannot be commodified because it affects consumers. Fascism is capital’s answer to the crisis. It can’t be voted away. We must demand for a planned economy to transform into a sustainable society. It’s our only hope. This is where we need to be.
Hate to break it to you, but sometimes the opposite of a bad thing is another bad thing. Not even China rocks a planned economy anymore. They have these things like money and markets instead now.
I think that’s his point: the China that existed as a planned economy collapsed decades ago and got replaced with their current quasi-capitalist system because the planned economy model was even worse than free market capitalism.
Then China will collapse too. You have to get out of binary thinking. Us versus them. Any society based on growth will fail. Produce resources for survivability. That is all. Our way of doing things is gone. It can’t continue. Adapt or die.
While you’re getting out of binary thinking, consider that perhaps fully capitalist and fully planned economies are both bad, and a compromise between the two, attempting to harness the best features of each, is necessary.
Just like over-eating and under-eating are both bad. A healthy balance is better.
I read an article not too long ago about a guy who started a worker owned restaurant. Everyone got a really good salary and any profits would be split evenly between all the workers. The article reveals that the business hasn’t actually turned a profit but it didn’t matter to the employees because the business made enough to cover it’s expenses and all the workers were paid really well (IIRC they were making something like $30 an hour).
The concept really blew my mind: a business didn’t need to be profitable to be successful.
Capitalism really does seem to be the problem.
Now imagine every business was ran this way. No overproduction. No expanding markets. Only producing what is needed. But there’s the rub. Who decides what is needed? Our whole cultural paradigm must change for this to be possible, and we don’t have generations to work out the kinks. It truly is the tragedy of the commons.
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
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.
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.
NPR = “Nice Polite Republicans”.
Among the left, it’s always been a running joke that outlets like PBS (Petroleum Broadcast System) and NPR are somehow agents of liberalism.
I seem to recall NPR’s own ombudsman said they rely too much on corporate/conservative sources. They are not nearly as “liberal” as the unhinged right wing declares they are.
NPR isn’t perfect but damn if it isn’t one of the best we’ve got. NPR, Reuters, Al Jezeera sometimes, that’s all I got for being dependable. Washington Post can be surprisingly neutral considering who they’re owned by. Who do you pay attention to?
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).
. Trump had a history of corruption going back decades
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
Not a chance did they ever report on him in the seriousness that they should have. He was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes and the amount of investigative reportering they did was on par to someone running for city counsel.
He was on trial for sexual assault, and they gave that the same seriousness as the BS accusation against Biden who was wrongly accused to being touchy-feely. Somehow when you are the Republican candidate, multiple rape accusations are somehow the same as false touching accusations. And that’s just the free-passes they gave him on his sexual assault problems, let alone countless other things they could have dug into.
The media absolutely has lots a ton of legitimacy over the years and them giving him one free pass after another only made it worse.
Yep. They did next to nothing to really vet him in any way. And so many had a vendetta against the Clintons that they just could not help but try to get their digs in on Hillary and Bill as much as possible, too.
Yup. Republicans had been building a case against Hillary for some 2 decades. So much so, in fact, that even seasoned Democrats were falling for those attacks against her were ingrained into our pop culture.
Such a shame because she would have made a perfect president. She was a pitbull that was willing to call Republicans on their shit.
The same seasoned Democrats that stacked the primaries in her favor? The 2016 election was the first time I had a real voice in an election and it felt like it was just vacuumed away. The candidate who seemed the most appropriate and the most qualified got swept under the rug in favor of the shit-throwers. She wasn’t perfect, she was a better terrible than Trump.
In 2020 the Democrats scrambled for a viable candidate and somehow Joe Biden was the best they could give us, and it was an absolute gamble. His victory in the 2020 election was dangerously overstated and the danger of a repeat of 2016 in 2024 was ignored.
I was convinced she’d be a neoliberal and would make grand bargains with the GOP like Bill did. Those grand bargains included “welfare reforms” like kicking grandmas out of public housing when their grandkids would deal drugs in their project (like grandmas have the power to control their grown-ass grandchildren). The impacts of Clinton’s actions reached FAR beyond his presidency - I was fighting such evictions at Legal Aid during the second term of Bush Jr., evictions that were the result of Clinton’s bargain with the devil.
Though you’re right, most of the right’s anti-Bill Clinton bumper stickers during his 2 terms were actually shots at Hillary Clinton.
It was Hillary Clinton that elevated trump as a pied piper, the media discovered an advertising and viewer gold mine. Had her hubris not gotten involved he may have never become president
It takes a special brand of caustic to lose an election to Donald Trump but fuck if the Dems didn’t find someone with just that.
Her televised discussion with those millennials was an exercise in tone deafness (and cringe). Of course she was the better candidate but like it or not: politics is a popularity contest and although he is deplorable to any sane person Trump is loved by inbred Nazis. Hillary is just not likeable. By anyone.
Pray for the day when these circumstances change and the most qualified candidate is always the clear winner but that day is not today.
Folks got to pay for news to get good news. If it’s all just ad supported you’re going to get click bait that just generates clicks for ad views. Google destroyed good print news. The combination of consumer attitudes changing in the digital age to being less willing or expecting print journalism to be free, and Google monopolizing of display ad space really messed things up. Also, the shift from nightly news being mostly an operational cost or non revenue generating program to 24/7 cable news didn’t help the tv side of things.
You’re missing the forest for the trees, mate. Ad supported doesn’t necessarily mean bad journalism. There might always be a conflict of interest there, but that model worked decently fine for many,any decades.
You need to learn about the Fairness Doctrine.
This was a broadcast rule that essentially forced news outlets in the US to air both sides of a story in as unbiased as a way as reasonably possible. If you know your history, you won’t be surprised that the Fairness Doctrine was thrown out in the 80s under the Reagan administration.
People complain about Citizens United being an awful decision that was greatly impacted the way government works, and I agree, but the end of the Fairness Doctrine was also a huge step in the fascist future that Republicans have been pushing toward for decades now.
Folks got to pay for news to get good news.
On the contrary: “If it bleeds, it leads.” All too often, news presents the world as much scarier than it actually is, and in ways that you can’t do anything about.
Today I almost clicked on the article posted on Lemmy about a gang-rape and murder in India. What the fuck would I benefit from reading that? I don’t have any control over what people do in India! I live in California. I can’t punish those criminals; I can’t protect the next person they would have targeted. I can’t vote the Modi-fascists out of office.
The only thing that me reading about that could have done is fuck up my day, and send ad revenue to the site hosting the article. It would be me rewarding someone for making my life worse, at no benefit to anyone.
People regularly pay for “news” whose only possible effect on them is to make them into worse people: more scared, more angry, more hateful.
Folks got to pay for news to get good news.
Unfortunately, partisan propaganda and outright disinformation is free, while factual and informative news tends to be behind paywalls
This has a way of segregating people that don’t have discretionary money to subscribe to news services into epistemic bubbles, and the bubble dwellers’ votes count for just as much as everybody else’s. In a democracy, you really do need voters in general to be informed and unfortunately, not everybody in the media/politics sphere wants everybody to be informed and some folks in there just want people indoctrinated into their way of thinking.
Journalists today have no association with the scum of the Earth types radicalized by authoritarian movements. They are college educated and understand complex principles, but radicalized people are the opposite, which is simple and based on assumptions. It’s built on racism, xenophobia, and hate towards anyone different from them that they can blame. The entire point is about power and ensuring that conservatives hold that power.
Now many young people think there is an oligarchy in the United States, which there isn’t, yet. This conservative authoritarian movement intends to establish it. Currently power still resides in the voters. The wealthy keep circumventing the means of messaging but fail time after time. That is why Elon really bought Twitter and intends to destroy it, because it prevented the message the wealthy wanted the public to believe. It’s why the Fediverse is so important, because the wealthy can’t stop the flow of information.
News need to be reduced to just news, without the presenters’ opinions on it. It’s this “processed information” dilemma, fuelled by greed and enabled by lacklustre regulations, that’s enabling the chaos. Not just (but especially) in the USA.
There is no such thing as news that does not have analysis and editorial processing in it. The more someone tries to pretend there is no implicit bias in their reporting on facts the more nervous you should be.
Being upfront about your biases, writing persuasively, and admitting/addressing counterfactuals and limitations is the honest way to report the news.
Honestly, I couldn’t disagree more.
I think doing this is what’s got us into this pickle to begin with, where everything is so ultra partisan
They’re right though. The best propaganda is built on facts out of context.
The truth is even during the days of Edward R Murrow the news was still highly biased and politicized. Whether or not you chose to acknowledge it. No matter how neutral or unbiased you try to be. The ways in which you choose to frame things, or the things you choose to focus on. Will always Expose and push your own biasses. Anyone who thinks they can truly Escape such things has little clue of what they’re talking about. If scientists and researchers can’t create AI devoid of Mankind’s worst biases and bigotry. What makes you think actual people can escape it?
There is much too much editorializing in the news. It’s so rare to even see an actual news article that doesn’t use tweets as citations or even the basis for their entire article.
I really feel like journalism has just devolved into journalists scrolling Twitter and writing about what they’ve read every day.
It’s always been bad, but some decades ago, newspapers and TV brought on actual experts for analyses, whereas these days, everyone can step on a soapbox – as a result, you get people who have no clue what they’re talking about spouting nonsense left and right.
Of course you want people to do educate themselves on their own on matters they find important, but it developed into a direction where watching Fox and reading some tweets from your echo chamber gives you enough confirmation to make you feel like you did do proper research.
Reporting on tweets IS factual reporting.
It’s just out of context. It needs to be properly analyzed and editorialized (to show how utterly inconsequential it is, or stop the story from running entirely because of its lack of newsworthiness – both of which are judgement calls beyond that mere facts).
You’re conflating two totally different things. Inconsequential, low-value reporting is a natural consequence of the way society has devalued journalism over our lifetime. Both literally and figuratively. News outlets simply cannot afford the kind of beat and investigative journalism they used to be able to do, but they still have to put out articles to keep eyeballs on them or else they will only lose more funding. It has nothing more to do with media bias than any other kind of reporting (that is to say, all reporting contains biases).
One way it devalues it is by simply drying up funding, making intensive investigative journalism basically impossible for any professional.
Another way is by spreading this vast narrative of the biased media that cannot be trusted on anything (which feeds into the funding drought).
The cure is journalistic transparency and individual media literacy, not for journalists to pretend they’re beep boop robots that have no normal human opinions on anything.
I guess you just accept that no journalist can be bothered to ‘investigate’ who blew up those pipelines because ‘funding has dried up’ making it ‘impossible’ for them to ask questions?
This seems like something any real journalist would love to sink their teeth into, and discover the truth of. Why haven’t any of them? Because they don’t have funding?
Bleh, I don’t buy it. Not one bit. That’s an excuse.
And tweets aren’t facts, they are statements. If a journalist wants to ‘report’ on a statement made on Twitter they still need to at least go an interview the person who made the tweet, then interview people around that person, and interview people who refute whatever statement is made in the tweet.
Like, you know …. Follow up.
But what it sounds like you’re saying is ‘no one has enough funding to do anything more than sit at home and remotely scroll Twitter looking for stuff to write their opinions about’.
I’m sorry, but I demand much more than that from the media.
sure, and if the news organizations could make a profit from “just news” they could choose to do that, the fact is, in today’s hyper partisan environment viewers and readers would rather consume the type of hype that fox news has to offer, you may not wish this were so, but it is in fact the case, when the normal joe or jane wants to find out what’s transpiring in the world around them they usually want all the information, and the opinions in order to shape theirs, which is why twitter was so popular with not just the average person but celebrities, and governments
