Donald Trump and US politics

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Laurium wrote:

It’s a simple concept of: is CNN fitting their narrative to the news, or are they fitting the news to their narrative. If you answered in your head just now for either case you should ask yourself why the hell there is a narrative in the first place from the “most trusted name in news”.

It's a good question to ask. Here's what I think the answer is.

1. There's no real market in primary sources. For example, the EO stuff: I went to wh.gov and the 9th Circuit's official page. Not media outlets at all. No one got paid per page view. The information isn't the market; the punditry is.

2. The narrative exists in the population. Asking whether a particular subculture's narrative existed before the media's narrative is like asking what came first, the chicken or the the egg. The mainstream media knows that a vast majority of their viewers supported Clinton and the new-media consumers Trump. Their audience wants new reasons to hate Trump and they're serving that market.

Or put another way: people don't want recrimination from pundits, they want vindication.

3. As far as the punditry industry goes, it is therefore true that the news will always be made to fit the customers' narrative. The only way to "escape" this is through the nature of the customers' narrative on narratives; that is, if the customer believes that media will inherently twist news to suit the narrative.

This is why we have a two-party partisan culture within the US. In a mono-narrative propaganda system, the Matrix is too easily escaped; however, with an "othering" of one mainstream narrative, the other mainstream narrative can be held as righteous. They point to the bias of the opposition while denying their own. Poison as food, poison as antidote.

4. However, for those who reject both of these narratives, those who see how they're two halves of the same coin, there is a market for punditry. Such pundits would need to apply the cynicism of narrative-fitting not only to competing punditry, but also to themselves; they would need to openly admit their bias towards seeing bias in everything. In this way, fitting their minor narrative to the news would be part of their larger narrative that all pundits fit their news to their narrative. Therefore: the only pundits you can expect to pay more respect to facts then to narrative are the anti-pundit pundits.

A good indicator of this: if you think Bush was a bad president and Obama a good one, you've fallen into partisanship. If you think Bush was a good president and Obama a bad one, same thing. But if you think both were essentially the same, except Bush fucked up public schools while Obama fucked up healthcare, then maybe there's some hope for you.

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kolyaboo wrote:

For real. There are people unemployed chronically that refuse to work in fast food, pick crops, etc.

Because those jobs don't pay livable wages. They're typically things teenagers do just to make a few bucks on the side while living @ their moms.

I used to do farm work when I was a teenager, it paid a bit more than working fast food. Most of what I did was stacking square bales on a trailer, or harvesting tobacco. You could make $80-$100/day cash money. But it was seasonal work. I paid $5000 cash for my first vehicle. With money I got working on farms over a summer. Teenagers these days are too effeminate to do that kinda work. They're not "hard" like I was.

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Teenagers these days are too effeminate to do that kinda work. They're not "hard" like I was.

Can't argue with that!

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Laurium wrote:

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Snip

Good on you to respond and to take up many issues on this thread with various others.

But, you strike me as a person who can’t see the forest for the trees.

To deconstruct my earlier post on the basis of countering one-off examples I threw in just to provide a little concreteness is missing the point entirely.

The problem is how to demonstrate to someone that one is indeed in a forest, rather than, say, an arboretum. The reason I countered your one-off examples is because you essentially implied, "We're in a forest, check out these trees", but none of the trees turned out to be trees. But okay, let's zoom out. How would we demonstrate these issues of "fake news"?

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This is a great example. The Dan Rather incident was in 2004. He stepped away from CBS not too long after. Between him and Williams, your counterpoint is to identify two instances of accountability in over a decade across multiple networks? Do you not see how nitpicky this is? The point isn’t that this guy should go, or that person needs a three week reprimand because of these exact words as per this linked online article time-stamped xx/xx/xxx. It also has nothing to do with frequency of occurrence “in my eyes” (you’re being snotty with that). Rather, it’s to say that there is a larger issue where the MSM is rarely held accountable for their actions. This includes content, tone, inflection, consistency, etc. It’s not contingent upon whether a story is reported “correctly” or “incorrectly”. CNN can accurately regurgitate the events of the day, but if it’s done in a consistently hateful tone with dismissive inflection because the subject is “the right wing”, over time it fuels untrustworthiness and allows an inroad for application of the “fake news” label, which Kolyaboo eloquently defines as euphemism for “bullshit”.

Just something that bugs me in general... Can we perhaps pull back on confusing "bias" with "bullshit"?

Mercola is for the most part non-partisan; the website is still chock-full of complete horseshit.
MediaMatters wears its partisanship on its sleeve; its content is nonetheless extremely accurate media commentary.

"Biased" is not the same thing as "wrong". And in confusing these two issues, we make the issue even harder to address. Because I'd say there's a substantial difference between "an anchor lets his own political opinion bleed into the coverage" and "the anchor makes shit up". They're both not great, but the former is an error of judgment, while the latter is a major ethical failing. It's the difference between me accidentally downloading my dropbox full of porn onto the company computer (I have done something wrong at my job) and me intentionally downloading a virus onto the company computer (I have done something maliciously wrong at my job). These are different issues. A report with a partisan spin needn't necessarily be wrong or bullshit.

And just like in my company, you wouldn't necessarily hear about me getting reprimanded for the former case. We don't have good access to the inner workings of companies like this, and they probably aren't going to spend a whole lot of time airing all their dirty laundry. Or do you think people should be fired and publicly shamed over minor infractions like that Blitzer thing you mentioned earlier?

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This move where you comb the archives and link back to a single YouTube or single news article is a lame exercise in notching imaginary points on the scorecard of “I am right and here’s why”. So, you found 8 benign minutes of Blitzer on Feb. 2 and conclude the larger point of editorializing daily events is ultimately dismissible. OK.

No. I'm saying that I just don't know what you're talking about. I am no expert on cable news, because I don't watch very much cable news. In discussions like this, I don't typically cite cable news, unless it's an online print article.

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The gradual transformation from euphoria to despair, among the faces of the “real” “fair” and “objective” journalists, as battleground states went to Trump might help you to understand why people are apt to label said networks as “fake news”.

But that's nonsense. It's basically saying, "You don't like my political party, therefore what you have to say must be wrong". It's an entirely partisan decision to discredit a news source because the pundits there don't share your opinion on a presidential candidate. This is why it's such a problem that we're conflating so many things so many ways. A news source is not "fake" because it makes an error, and displaying a personal opinion on an issue is not even that.

The vast majority of the "mainstream media", be that cable news or newspapers, was against Donald Trump. Even traditionally right-wing, conservative outlets almost universally threw their support behind Johnson or Clinton, because they recognized that Trump should not be President. Why should this automatically discredit them? It should be a moment for any sane person to step back, and ask, "Okay, why is it that the entire fourth estate in our country is terrified of this man becoming president? Maybe it's similar reasons to why the majority of the academics, economists, and scientists were freaking out as well."

Instead, this is being held up as an example of why the mainstream media is "fake news". Except even then, we're again conflating two completely separate things - bias, and accuracy.

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In the end, you and I will have to agree to disagree. I believe the term “fake news” is a catchall that helps to explain why Americans no longer trust media outlets, and I believe they are fairly justified as per said outlets’ actions over the last ten+ years. You do not. And that’s OK.

The crucial part of my post was right near the start, IMO.

Honestly, the term originally had a very clear meaning - it referred to (primarily online) news outlets which just blatantly made shit up. The kinds of outlets that published stories like "Pope endorses Donald Trump". I suppose that train has left the station quite a while ago, but the term is loaded, and if all we're talking about is lapses in journalistic integrity, the term is not well-suited.

When someone says "fake news", the implication is not "this news source has made some mistakes in its editorial policy", it's "this news source is fundamentally untrustworthy". I don't think this applies to any mainstream news network. Not even FOX, despite how frequently their pundits lie, despite the many egregious cases of bias, despite the leaks of internal memos that paint the channel as essentially a mouthpiece for the republican part.

It also dilutes the term (IMO, this was intentional), making it harder to call out news outlets which do fall under the original meaning. But okay, let's work with your definition.

Notice how you're using a term that initially existed to describe news sources whose headlines were fabricated out of whole cloth to describe a mainstream news organization... Because their anchors were upset that Trump won the election. This is NOT a good catchall term, and the distrust facing the news is not reasonable.

The right wing has been working the refs for ages now, and it keeps on working. Trump is taking it even further, however, and it really needs to stop.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Snip

It's all good bro. Like I said, we agree to disagree.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

MediaMatters wears its partisanship on its sleeve; its content is nonetheless extremely accurate media commentary.

Hahahahaha!

Let's take a visit and hunt us some fake news, shall we?

From https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/02/24/trump-just-blacklisted-media-outlets-we-warned-you-would-happen/215456

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at CPAC this morning, Trump devoted six minutes of his speech to an anti-media screed, characterizing outlets doing critical reporting as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.”

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Trump and his administration will happily trample all over the press while giving favorable treatment to outlets willing to play ball. They want propaganda partners, not an adversarial press.

From the six minutes in question: "I'm not against the media. I'm not against the press. I don't mind bad stories if I deserve them. And I love good stories, but we won't talk. I don't get too many of them. But I am only against the fake news media or press." — Donald Trump

From https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/01/27/watch-kellyanne-conway-push-three-anti-abortion-myths-under-two-minutes/215157

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2. “Taxpayer-Funded” Abortion Is A Right-Wing Media Myth

Conway listed “taxpayer-funded abortion” as one of the reasons she’s participating in the March for Life.

Fact: The Hyde Amendment already prohibits federal abortion funding -- with negative consequences for abortion access.

Conway and right-wing media have insisted that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers use taxpayer money to fund abortion services -- despite a longstanding prohibition on the use of federal funds for this purpose.

The Hyde Amendment is a budgetary rider that has barred the use of federal Medicaid funds to cover abortion care, except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the mother’s life. Significantly, days before the March for Life, the House of Representatives voted to codify and dangerously expand the Hyde Amendment.

As the last paragraph implies, there are exceptions under which Medicaid funds are permitted for use towards abortion — for most practical purposes, when the woman claims to have been raped (a conviction is not required, due to time limitations), and when prescribed by a doctor due to high-risk pregnancy. Furthermore, federal standards compel funding of abortion in those instances. At a minimum, those are clear instances of federally funded abortion, and given the potential for fraud in the funding standards, I think it's naive to pretend that only real rape victims, and only mothers who would die carrying to term, are funded.

Personal note: all three of my sons were high-risk pregnancies meeting the standard for taxpayer-funded abortion. The first two of these were on Medicaid. We were offered twice; we refused twice. The third was on TRICARE.

From https://mediamatters.org/video/2017/02/23/msnbc-laverne-cox-explains-human-reality-trumps-rescinding-trans-inclusive-policies/215445

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And the current administration is revoking of these guidelines yesterday feels like we are moving backwards. And I think it sends a message to transgender people that we are not safe in this country.

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When trans people cannot access public bathrooms we can't go to schools effectively, go to work effectively, access healthcare facilities, it's about us existing in public space.

No one is telling trans people they "cannot access public bathrooms;" they are, at worst, forbidding them to use one of the two, while allowing access to the other. You can argue about the fairness of such prohibitions, but it's absurd to pretend that they're telling a class of people that they are prohibited from both men's and women's rooms.

It's all fake news about Trump. Anonymous Allegations are not evidence. Liberals don't know the difference. To busy learning about safe spaces and shit instead of English language.

Senator Cotton said no evidence he's seen exists. Liberals/globalists and deep state who wants graft to continue just want to put Trump though a fishing expedition hoping it lowers his popularity.

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morbo wrote:

Agreed with Ray here. It's either "automation is destroying people's jobs" or "we need to import foreign workers", it cant be both. The issue has more to do with people (westerners) not wanting to do dirty "low" jobs, rather than a real lack of manpower.

Unlike logic, reality doesn't play by the rules. It is both. Automation isn't moving fast enough or in the right job areas to fill the gaps. If you think about it, why would someone buy an expensive robot and then have it take the place of a few low paying jobs, when it could replace a few high paying jobs?

Until robots get paychecks, they won't replace consumers, which is a key part of the economic engine. Yeah, in some ways it's a big Ponzi scheme that will collapse, but so far its usually managed to collapse on small segments rather than as a whole.

I'm not saying that I agree population growth should be the answer, just that the lack of growth or a decline has usually led to economic decline. Robots are going to have to become creative before they will ever offset the output that humans tend to come up with as an aggregate.

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DalaiLama wrote:

Unlike logic, reality doesn't play by the rules.

Yeah, in some ways it's a big Ponzi scheme that will collapse,

Translation: unlike logic, the mass delusion we've cultivated and labeled "reality" doesn't play by the rules.

Well, it doesn't. But reality — the real one — still does, thus the scheme will inevitably collapse.

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DalaiLama wrote:

Until robots get paychecks, they won't replace consumers

Are you suggesting that the makers and servicers of robots don't consume? Maybe they're like the Joker and burn all the money.

Automation is BS to keep ur eyes off ball of cheap labor arbitrage. Remember when they told us NAFTA and GATT would be great. We have been lied to by elite economists (paid corp shills) for at least 30 years. Seems like the far left (hedges, sanders) and far right are waking up but most ppl are still clueless gobbling up their garbage used to impoverish u.