It might surprise you that many of us (for instance, me) have formed their opinions about his cabinet picks through independent reading about these people’s backgrounds, beliefs, and past actions. This, and not because some mysterious Illuminati-like apparatus called the “MSM” has the power to control our thoughts, is what leads to conclusions and concerns about their qualifications and the agenda that his administration is likely to pursue.
But that’s not what he said he did, and any actual information behind it is buried behind tweetstorm and Taiwangate. That’s why I mentioned shrill people, there’s a long multi-tweet rant complaining that Trump should have bigger worries than a comedy sketch making the rounds, and people speculating that his phone call to Taiwan will cause WW3, which aren’t going to actually put anyone off of him and serve to bury any chance at someone even noticing that.
Seriously, his habit of tweeting about random crap that he’s thinking looks more and more like a clever plan to get people talking about random inconsequential stuff instead of anything substantive.
In a certain sense, Trump is getting away with a lot, by stacking the outrage all together at once.
If any other POTUS had a typical Cabinet and one Betsy DeVos, then DeVos would be the subject of outrage for weeks. But because DeVos is only one unusual Cabinet pick among many unusual Cabinet picks, the outrage is blended in with the outrage among others.
On a scale from 1 to 10, people can only muster so much outrage. So if DeVos gets a 10, and everyone in the Cabinet also gets a 10, then the outrage over 10 Betsy DeVoses isn’t much more than 1 Betsy DeVos. Trump is getting a big outrage discount. He gets to slide in 100 units of hysteria under the limited ceiling reserved for 20 units of hysteria.
Original take.
So, this “mainstream media” is an entity, it has qualities that can be identified? And one of those quantities is a liberal bias that goes against the popular opinion? Which is you guys?
How come they aren’t broke, then? Who is buying advertising so as not to reach the average American? If you guys are such a majority, how come Trump lost the popular to the least popular candidate the other guys got?
Probably doesn’t matter much. Most people won’t read the article. Most people don’t have the nuanced understanding of WHY Trump was named “Person of the Year” or that it really refers to his influence on the news, and is not actually an endorsement of Trump. This is exactly the sort of thing that will get passed around on Facebook and Twitter and at the water cooler: “Hey, did you hear Time named Trump the ‘Person of the Year’” and get passed off as some sort of endorsement, and rarely be challenged as such.
Which is why the media [POST=19794091]should stop focusing on whatever spastic stream of consciousness rant that Trump is tweeting about[/POST] and pay careful attention to the substantive damage his administration is actually doing to the nation’s economy, security, and relationships with other world powers. While I wouldn’t give Trump credence that he is smart enough to deliberately use his Twitter outrage to distract from his administration’s actions, the effect is still the same.
Stranger
He reminds me more, every day, of when Jesse Venture won the governor’s race in Minnesota. Who could hear about his Inaugaral Ball, where he wore a Jimmy Hendrix t-shirt and an electtic orange feather boa, and not smile. Kinda cool, but the guy was a lout. And after a while, its started to wear folks down.
This, exactly! Hillary voters are exhausted. We’re barely starting to catch up on sleep now, let alone muster well-deserved outrage over any single cabinet pick or other Trump transition action…much less spend the necessary energy on disapproval / sounding the alarm for the whole lot.
A month after the big event, some of us still wake up in the morning and have to endure a few minutes of the denial stage, still. The sheer magnitude of the collective insanity is so deflating for Trump’s opponents…I mean, where to begin?. I guess it will be around next summer when I’ll have time and energy to think about which of his disasters to help chip away at, and how that can be done most effectively and efficiently.
Why?
Maybe because he’s not actually president yet and nothing he says on twitter and nothing his cabinet or advisers does at the moment really matters a whit. The best of both worlds for Trump: lots of publicity without hardly any consequences or responsibility. And besides, it’s December - people want to be happy, not think about January.
Well, he was smart enough to win the election for President of the United States over the objections of both major parties, defeating the candidate selected by the Democratic party who a huge chunk of the establishment was certain was going to win, so maybe he’s not as dumb as people make him out to be. Calling someone dumb who managed to run a massively more successful campaign than your candidate doesn’t really say anything good about your judgement, maybe just maybe you’re underestimating him. He may not be a rocket scientist, but he’s clearly massively much better at influencing the public than either of the major parties.
You’re going to ride the popular vote count ride into the ground, aren’t you.
Do you think if that the rules were changed and the popular vote mattered that the campaigns would stay the same? It’d be entirely different top to bottom with a whole set of different results, because they’re going for different things if it’s the popular vote versus the EC.
You’re going to pound that into the sand.
Regarding why Time, Newsweek etc aren’t going broke, they are…
*Sales of single-issue copies plummeted 16% on average for the news magazines, roughly two times the 8.2% decline in single-issue sales that the magazine industry as a whole suffered. Time was the hardest hit, plummeting 27%. Newsweek, on the other hand, declined just 5%, the lowest drop among the six news magazines. While newsstand sales account for just a small portion of total circulation, they are deemed a more objective indicator of a magazine’s editorial appeal than subscription circulation, which is often influenced by discount programs and promotions. Niche publications also saw declines in 2012 in newsstand sales *]
They’ll be done in ten years.
This, pretty much. The world didn’t end so people feel a bit relieved and as a result, optimistic.
I will eat a pound of bugs if this prediction materializes.
The MSM has not.
That’s the point - the MSM no longer has a lock. Years ago, the national media had a monopoly, and they could at least try to push their agenda, although it didn’t always work. That started to fall apart with Reagan, and continued with the rise of talk radio and FoxNews.
Then in 2016 they thought, and everyone expected, that finally we were in a post-Republican era, and the attitude of “obviously you can’t vote for *that *guy when he is running against our anointed candidate” was going to be fulfilled. And at last we no longer need to worry about the rubes in flyover country - only those who agree with the opinion page of the New York Times are People Who Count. Only, you know, oops.
And change is hard. And the temptation is always, when “racistsexisthomophobeevil” doesn’t work, to double down with “RACISTSEXISTHOMOPHOBEEVIL!!!”. Which is a good deal of what we’ve seen from the MSM, and what we can expect to continue.
Regards,
Shodan
Not really. It was more like: “obviously you can’t vote for that guy when… he’s THAT guy!”
Decades of seeing and listening to talk radio, Fox News and misleading internet news only showed me that what you are trying to do here is to push for one of the oldest logical fallacies, there is a reason why an argument by popularity is considered a fallacy, the popularity of anti scienceand anti societal positions pushed by the right wing media is not related to the truthfulness of those positions.
Has Sam Wang inspired you? Because, I admit, what he did eat did feel like a cop out.
So, even though you didn’t vote for Trump, you believe all the same things his followers did. You believe the nonsense about “main stream media” being biased, which is just a way to push your own version of truth.
You still believe in a conspiracy. That liberals were secretly controlling everything in the news. Nevermind that the fake news was nearly all on the Republican side–provably this time.
And you still think that the party who can’t hold on to any minorities gets to define what racism is. We cry racism because there is racism. It’s the same reason I know my hometown is racist. Black people don’t want to come here. They come for a bit, and then wind up leaving.
I mean, as you guys have pointed out, Black people don’t get anything from Democrats. We aren’t pushing their issues. But they still go with us. Because Republicans keep on trying to deny racism, while Democrats accept it.
There’s a reason why Trump could only appeal to the white working class. Your party has a problem with Racism, and Trump exploited it more than anyone else.
For some reason, being told that something you did is racist is the Worst Possible Thing[supTM[/sup] for you guys, but avoiding that one easily avoidable thing is not.
And I know. Because I was a conservative. And now I know the things I thought that were racist and I just didn’t know. And I know it’s not remotely hard to change. It’s as easy as any other time I have to be conscious of others–which is kinda a requirement for me as a Christian.
Naw. I said it four years ago and I’ll say it again. It’s because the majority of Black folk been conditioned to vote that way absent an evidence. It matters not what your policies are; stick a D next to your name and you’re guaranteed to win a majority of the Block vote, and it’s been that way for 80 years now.
As it is, the media is biased. Most of the media are Democrats and it shows. Just look at the way they’ve been reporting on the economy and the unemployment rate relative to how they reported on it when GWB was president and relative to how they’ll report on it when Trump is President (rest assured, they’ll suddenly be interested in the labor force participation rate, job growth vs population growth and the growth of part time jobs relative to full time jobs).