"Here we are outside the Trump rally due to take place in about six hours now..."
Meanwhile, Sanders blows the roof off with 30,000 people. CNN? Silence.
The joke I was telling back then was Trump couldn't pass gas without live coverage on CNN with talking heads discussing if it were more "fruity" or "nutty".
Neolib media owners much prefer a raging fascist president to a socialist, as a fascist won’t challenge the status quo, just make it worse for the poors and minorities.
Nail on the head. There are some who call themselves Democrats who would rather have 1000 Trumps for President than let someone who would shake up the status quo get their hands on the levers of power.
Which one gets more views? Trump gets supporters and angry opponents watching, Bernie barely gets supporters watching. Their job is to sell ads and therefore need viewers.
S’real simple, corporate news. Use the words “lie” and “liar”. Start there. Now.
True journalists may also note that “convicted fraud” “sex offender” and “high profile adulterer” are rock-solid legally and ethically. Go forth and fulfill your purpose. For once.
Lie is a tough word to use in law and journalism. To accuse someone of lying you have to prove intent to tell the lie vs being truly mistaken.
For example, if I say the Earth is flat am I lying or mistaken? If I truly believe that, then it's not a lie, even though facts clearly say otherwise. I'm just not aware or choose to disagree with those facts.
It's maddening. I'm with you and wish journalists would use harsher language in obvious cases, but I understand why they tend not to as a standard to ensure they're not opening themselves up to claims of liable and defamation.
I'm sorry but no, they are not open up to liable or defamation lawsuits by calling a public figure running for office a liar. For pete sake, Tucker regularly called pretty much every popular democrat a liar over the course of his show. Pretty much every right wing mud slinger does.
Regardless of whether or not that's true, Trump has literally been found to be a liar in a court of law so there's really no excuse with him in particular.
The press reported that Donald Trump said he was a serial rapist who liked to just walk up and 'grab them by the pussy.'
The press reported that Donald Trump had gone on Howard Stern's show and talked about how he was allowed to walk into the dressing rooms of the Miss Teen USA pageant.
The press reported that Donald Trump called American prisoners of war cowards; while comparing his tom cat days as his personal Vietnam.
Don't blame the press, blame the voters who heard about Trump and decided they were okay with him because he hated the people they hate.
There's a difference between reporting on the candidate and giving him free air time by broadcasting his rallies and speeches live. Most of the 24 hour networks (CNN especially) ran out of significant things to report on Trump relatively quickly, but they knew Trump stories (negative or positive) were huge for ratings, so they would cover everything he said. It's estimated he got $2 Billion worth of free airtime this way. For every important story you mentioned, there's days worth of mindless coverage the media companies churned out for ratings, and it absolutely helped Trump get elected.
People perceive as important that which is given lots of exposure.
I believe it's called the "Halo effect".
That's why people pay attention to, say, what movie celebrities say in subjects that have nothing to do with acting or movie making, to the point of paying much less attention to what subject specialists say than to what those celebrities say. If you thing about it, in absolutelly logical terms, the opinions of a well know movie actor on, say, poverty, have about as much value as the opinions of the local street cleaner (in fact, probably less value, as said street cleaner is likelly to actually be poor him or herself and thus know more about it) and yet people will actually pay much more attention to what said actor has to say on that subject.
So Trump and others like them don't even need much more airing of their actual words for this to work: the more they're talked about the more important they will be perceived to be and hence when they do get their actual words aired the more attention people will pay to their words and even the more likely they are to trust those words (because he's an "important" person).
It's not necessarily as simple as actual mutual hatred. That only explains a fraction of his votes.
His voters want to believe that if something is okay for the president, then it's okay for them, even if it's not.
All his voters have "bone spurs" of some kind, so they want to enable people with "bone spurs", and vote for Mr.Bone Spurs, even if trump would gladly fire someone for having "bone spurs".
They hate everyone else and he hates everyone else, so they feel represented, even if he hates them. What good has he ever done for the demographic that voted for him and paid his bills? Absolutely nothing.
It's one big ass grift.
That also turns it into a sunken cost fallacy for a lot of them. They lie to themselves, because they're too vain and afraid to face their mistake. The extremism plays into this as well. Once you cross a point of what is normal morality, it gets considerably harder to walk back from there.
If Trump really hates immigrants, then why does he keep hiring them at Mar-a-Lago? The answer is simple: money. He has absolutely no interest in cutting off the supply of cheap workers. The extremely expensive wall construction also didn't work in any meaningful way.
The only thing he did successfully was to rile up a lot of angry people just to collect their money.
Human are way more irrational that we care to believe, which is why all that exposure made people feel he was important which in turn increased the attention they paid to him and the chances of them voting for him.
It's quite a common and massive error amongst the most politically-aware types to confuse the way in which politics are approached by themselves and others with whom the generally discuss politics (and it's almost always other politically-aware types who care to discuss politics) with the way in which most people out there approach politics.
Marketing works, so it makes sense that when it comes to people who are not strongly political and hence basically relate to it as they would to brands, marketing in politics works.
It also works vice versa, you all need to learn that making life decisions to spite your parents isn't something to be proud of. Make decisions for yourself and smart ones at that.
To be fair, the onslaught of negative Trump coverage also helped him lose the house in 2018, the general in 2020 and a shit load of easy Republican house seats in 2022.
People seem to forget that a lot of folks stayed home in 2016 because they thought it was impossible for that clown shoe to get elected. No one believes that anymore.
It certainly doesn't help that any criticism of Biden online, valid or not, is immediately met with "BuT tRuMp Is WoRsE!"
Like, I get it, orange man bad, but if any discussion of Biden's failures immediately devolves in to talking about the other guy, then opportunities to talk about his accomplishments are washed away by the people who need to be focusing on them.
This isn't just the media. The entire fucking conversation is always directed towards that dipshit.
The entire fucking conversation is always directed towards that dipshit.
Understandable right now, because he's an existential threat to the US, and will remain so every election until he's either elected (at which point we're done) or he dies.
I've also been saying this for a while. If the people who hate him quit talking about him, they will quit advertising for him. Let him be forgotten. I honestly hear significantly more people and news media who are against him, talking about him, than I do people in favor of him. Don't let him live in your head rent free. Talk about the person who you DO want as president. Talk about the things that are important to you, that your candidate is for. Don't talk about the other guy. Let his name fade into history.
You don't have to report "both sides" of an issue if one side of that issue is blithering insanity.
News today: "Should we eat horse paste and shove UV lights up our own asses to fight Covid? Donald Trump says 'Yes' but honestly, WHO KNOWS? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ "
mmm yes I suppose it also had nothing to do with the alternative candidate gg ez cheating their primary and defending said cheating after getting exposed
or I guess if you want to apply it to right now, I suppose it had nothing to do with the incumbent funding a genocide and running his campaign on "well at least I'm not the guy who's even more evil"