a throwback to 2016 that doesn’t feel like a throwback to 2016
The thing is, it’s not even what’s depicted in the comic. The media constantly softballed Trump. While some of his success, especially initially in 2015/16, can be attributed to “No publicity is bad publicity”, the fact also is that the media at large was unwilling to call out Trump’s bullshit for what it was, because it would lose them part of their viewer base for very little gain. God, the number of people - including liberal leaning people - who did not know or did not understand various aspects of the promises of the Trump campaign and the actions of the Trump administration last time is just… astounding.
Unwilling is one way to put it. Complicit as hell is how i would say it. Every phrasing of every headline i have seen for years now has been manufactured to share blame, shield blame or outright place blame where it doesn’t belong. Slap “sources say” on the end and you apparently can say whatever you want.
You mean exactly how Lemmy treats Elon Musk?
“Enough Musk spam! People give him WAY too much attention!”
also
“look at his new project! what a idiot”
“did you see his new tweet? (not calling it X 😤)”
“check out this photo of him at an event he’s aging lol!”
No, he is just objectively a terrible human being.
🎶I make my livin’ off the evenin’ news. Just give me somethin’, somethin’ I can use. People love it when you lose. They love dirty laundry.🎶
This song is proof nothing has changed in over forty years.
Exactly how I felt about it as it was happening, fucking stop talking about his bullshit and talk about the positives of any alternative players! We know he’s bad news!
Except that is not what is being found now. Actually, many people who voted for him didn’t actually know anything about his “bad news” because they didn’t watch the sources that were actually reporting on the truly bad stuff and now they are finding out and are regretting their decisions. In the days after the election Google reported a spike in searches related to “Changing your vote USA”.
I remember reading about that too. I wonder where the truth lies in all this.
As I remember the sources we saw it in were in the reputable realm. I also think think many of these people voted for him to vote against Kamala (or against a woman) but didn’t actually think he would win because their vote didn’t matter.
Meanwhile, the Business As Usual Party has decided that their only mistake was that they didn’t stick closely enough to their usual 1992 playbook.
Internal critics point to ignoring vulnerable people who weren’t widely accepted as standard humans in 1992 in stead of actively vilifying them as their biggest mistake.
True to form, they then warmly welcomed their new fascist overlords in between receiving legal bribes from billionaires and their corporations to be extremely weak when negotiating for workers and generous towards said billionaires when writing legislation and regulations.
I wish we could purge this idiotic nonsense.
The media reporting on the awful outrageous things didn’t elect Trump. The voters who voted for Trump elected Trump.
It’s news when Trump says awful outrageous things and they should be covered more, not less.
Otherwise you end up ‘obeying in advance.’
Fucking shithead morons still blaming the media instead of Trump and Trump’s voters. Stop it.
This take only works if the new media is reporting on Trump accurately and factually.
The problem is that they are not. Organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post spend most of their wordcount trying to wrangle the vile nonsense that Trump is spewing into something intelligent and legible, often by lying or misrepresenting his words. They’re not reporting his atrocities, they’re whitewashing them, and we should absolutely call that out as complicity.
Can you provide some examples of WaPo articles that did this? Everything I read that I can recall listed his statements in context and gave the actual facts.
They’re not reporting his atrocities, they’re whitewashing them, and we should absolutely call that out as complicity.
I agree with that but that’s not generally the criticism leveled at the media for their coverage of Trump’s awful and outrageous statements.
Basically you’re saying the media should cover Trump more and more critically. OP’s comic is suggesting that the media is blame for giving Trump coverage, for reacting to Trump.
I guess you’re right. For the comic to really be accurate, it’d need a panel with the news saying “Awful man has solid ideas and policy regarding the economy.”
There is too much blame to go around, and not enough people and orgs wanting to acknowledge blame.
Trump did not become a household name randomly. He was helped and aided by many. And I have noticed hundreds of times how the main stream media enabled his word salad and gave it meaning and power. In real life, not many people listen to blathering hateful idiots.
It’s almost like the same people who own the mainstream media will also profit from a Trump presidency.
Wasn’t it the CEO of NBC at the time who said in 2016 “Trump is bad for America but great for us”?
Trump supporters have been buying out networks and social media to support him. If they weren’t for him before they are now.
