I didn’t want to hijack the Tulsi Gabbard thread, so I’m putting this response in its own thread.
Trump was the media’s candidate. NBC lied to the people for years, building up his image as a genius businessman. Fox gave him a political platform. CBS admitted they backed his candidacy knowing it would wreck the country. That’s three networks who made him, and made him President. Since the first episode of his little game show, he has always worked for them.
In the Pit because I’m calling out NBC & CBS for lying about what they have done to US politics. I’m not wedded to it being a Pit thread, but it seemed appropriate.
Did they? Who broke that story? Did TV news care? If the TV news even cared, they could have torpedoed his nomination. His inverted ethics weren’t a secret.
They let Betsy DeVos and Wilbur Ross skate while they talk about Trump’s tweets. Why do they choose the inconsequential? Because it keeps the news focused on slap-fights and not crimes.
Trump is the star of the show. Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert nip at his heels, but their employers want Trump right where he is. Who’s the face, who’s the heel? Depends on whom you root for. The conglomerate just wants ratings.
The election was supposed to be Bush v. Hillary. Trump was a complete wild card. Nobody expected him to get the Republican Nomination much less win the election. He repeated said things that conventional wisdom should have disqualified him repeatedly. The fact he won practically defied reality itself. If this was all part of the corporate media plan then I . . . don’t even have words.
I see the point you’re making but I think the saying “never ascribe to malice what is better attributed to incompetence” is somewhat applicable here. The corporate media was overall negative in their coverage of Trump and the fact that it was such a circus and attracted eyeballs, and consequently add revenue, was a happy (for CEO’s & WS bankers) accident.
OK, just consider. The networks are gatekeepers of the Presidency. And they want their palms crossed with silver. Trump never paid them the amount of money a candidate is supposed to; they gave him free press instead. Why? Foolhardiness on their part? Or is it because he was the employee, not the client?
I suggest that Trump, not Clinton, was the real candidate of conspiracy.
The Deep State conspiracy theory is what, that the professionals will stay in charge and the USA stay the same? Big whoop. That’s not so much a conspiracy as it is small-c conservatism.
But get the GOP candidate in the White House, and the networks can complain about him on the air even as their owners’ taxes go down. Jeb was boring, Cruz was like a creepy televangelist, and Kasich doesn’t worship money quite enough. Why not try and build your own totally media candidate? If it doesn’t work, it’s still a funny little show. If it does, you get a tax cut in the billions and a corporate-friendly FCC. Being professional media, they may even have a better idea what sells to the rubes than most pols.
Trump’s campaign was planned by somebody. Why not his bosses at NBC?
My question is, was he paid? I kind of think he was. I think “Presidential candidate Trump” was a role he was paid to play.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying US politics is a television show, that’s for sure. AAAANd Trump was an employee of NBC sooooooo.
It’s all about the military industrial complex, and that means one thing - war. Had Clinton taken office, or in some other reality where Bush had won we would be watching a very different thing on television right now. It would be our dear commander in chief leading the way in the dread land of Syria killing those damn evildoers.
So far Trump hasn’t played that game & they knew he couldn’t be relied upon to do so. They may have made some money selling Tide pods and burgers on televison as a result of Trumps nomination but they have lost untold fortunes not getting the US bogged down in another useless war.
These people are more malevolent than you give them credit for.
Probably not in the* literal sense; Trump is a psychopath and works for nothing but his personal gratification. He’s also completely untrustworthy; even if they did pay him to do something he’d never actually do* it, he cheats people pretty much reflexively.
But he’s been a useful tool for them enhancing his ratings, certainly. And they did clearly slant coverage to keep the “horse race” going during the election.
I should have added “by the military-industrial complex”. It also explains why Sanders got railroaded. He wasn’t a neocon like Hillary and Bush. They knew they couldn’t have relied on Bernie to be a war hawk. Can you imagine Bernie being the cheerleader for blowing up schools and weddings in the middle east? I think most voters are anti-war, just misled.
William of Occam got it right when he wrote “Don’t ascribe to conspiracy theories or Machiavellian cleverness what can be explained by routine human nature.”
The CBS news director has to decide whether he’ll get more eyeballs with a 20-minute in-depth look, or with photos of a Kardashian and 30-seconds of amusing rants from an orange-skinned monster. It’s not a hard decision for him to make.
In the olden days, news editors felt a responsibility to inform the public. Now everything revolves around maximizing the next quarterly earnings report.
Some say potato, some say potahto. Some say guns-guns-guns. Some say neocon-drones-drones. Some say fed-fed-gold-gold. Whatever.
In GD or IMHO, sure. But this is the Pit. Don’t you feel some urge to shove face-to-shit and help someone smell his own ignorance?
With CBS basing its coverage on whether Trump or Kardashian seems more amusing today, befuddled Americans can hardly be blamed for turning to “Alternate Theories.”
Fenris, you have less credibility than I have on this board. It’s cute that you try to act almost like you care about minorities, though.
My issues with the USA’s knee-jerk Zionist biases are beside the point. (And of course, as I came to understand after one of those posts, the USA media landscape is far less Jewish at the corporate level now than it used to be, between the multinationals and New Corp.) Even if Les Moonves is Jewish (I assume) and Trump the Rump wishes he were, I wasn’t even thinking about that. Granted, it would dovetail nicely in the minds of anti-Semites; so thank you, Fenris, that may be useful if someone wants to sell this theory to the rubes.
Anyway, this thread was largely a way to drag DJ Motorbike out of a hijack in another thread, not that it worked. It was half-baked and not that serious.
Still…
I do marvel at the fact that an employee of an NBC show made himself a Fox News personality and then President based on his persona as developed on that show. I don’t mind exaggerating his fakeness and the media’s complicity for comic effect. But we live in an age where conspiracy theories about Trump *and the KGB *have gone mainstream. Now I wonder, if we’re going that far in the mainstream press (and we are), if there is a real conspiracy is a little closer to home. So I play with the idea.
