Hmmm! Trump disciplined? Time will tell. Long term, his ego will get in the way as it always does. And, Project 2025 will be a gift that keeps on giving, along with reproductive rights and freedoms. This 2024, not 1954.
Does that mean he’s playing golf?! You may think we are accepting passive readers but you would be seriously wrong. He’s a lazy self-impressed SOB who lies every time he opens his mouth. That may be cruise control but no cruise control we should admire!
Respectfully, please join the Hopium Chronicles for a very clear-eyed and real look at what's happening with the polling. This is still a very close and competitive race! We can win this thing! The ONLY thing that will keep us from winning is if we ALLOW ourselves to be fractured! Time to reunite behind our guy, Joe Biden. Spread the word through our networks about the jobs report in June, inflation ticking down in June, stock market at record highs! Let's be LOUD and PROUD!!!!
I've had to abandon Threads again. The absolute garment rending and teeth gnashing over there about people pointing out the obvious is just disheartening.
The Dem coalition is imploding because Biden is too old and the very online want to ignore that and ignore the polls showing Trump beating Biden.
Yup. For some reason Threads decided that what I want to read most are threads about how terrible MSNBC is, ad nauseum. I haven't abandoned it, but am now trying to fool the algorithm into giving me topics I really do want to read about :)
The prospect of more criminal convictions and possible jail time seem to have concentrated Trump's mind on the imperative to hire, listen to and follow the advice of his first professional, competent campaign co-advisors. Damn it.
Rep. Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican who flew to the Doral rally with other members of the state delegation and spent time with Trump, said it was “remarkable” to see how calm the candidate is.
I am more and more certain that t***p is on a specially formulated drug cocktail possibly adderall or ritalin or both. He still slurs his words and he still wanders off into "electric sharks" stories but the press as usual is giving him far more good coverage.
We should also remember the last time the republicans went into a convention without an announced VP pick we got Dan Quayle.
Just think of all the money the press will make with Trump in the Whitehouse again?! Every morning half of the public will wake up and immediately start looking for news of what the lunatic did while they were sleeping.
Trump has more motivation to keep disciplined, but his appartchicks don't have the same motivation. Hence the idiot who released the 350 names on the enemies list and the idiot running the Heritage Foundation and his statement about the 'bloodless' revolution if the left behaves itself. In the end Trump will get triggered and black swan himself.
Just watch his rally. He is an absolute hateful nutjob, every time he opens his mouth and more fodder for us. And the RNC convention next week will be pumping out the crazy shizzle, let's AMPLIFY.
I do watch some of his rallies. He's so repetitive it's no wonder they are not covered. The Convention should be a gold mine of political nuggets. I'm especially looking forward to Kimberly Guilfoile part two.
AB Stoddard said it best: The universe conspires in Trump’s favor. It is maddening when awful human beings get what they want. If he wins we get to watch him and his staff peacock arrogantly for four years while they burn it all down. If I didn’t care so much for my country, I’d find it a fascinating history and sociology lesson.
What’s all this talk of “softening on abortion”? I’m losing my mind reading all these pundit takes. They just added word salad about “14th amendment and life”, which is fetal personhood and is extremely radical (full abortion ban).
Trump gets the optics of being “moderate” and the most invested anti-abortion advocates will get what they want by giving Trump plausible deniability. Holy moly media is just failing massively on how they frame this.
It’s getting to the point that these newspapers and media outlets are paid by the Trump campaign. I have stopped reading NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Axios, CNN because I don’t wish to reward the dog piling with clicks.
Blaming the media is a losing strategy. Republicans have done that for a long time and it has rung hollow every time they lost a presidential election.
It’s time for Democrats to learn the lesson. The media, like referees get it wrong from time to time. But if you are getting blown out in a sports game and all you can do is blame the refs then you aren’t capable of being a winning team.
In the wisdom of the great Johnny Lawrence, it’s time for Democrats to flip the script:
Rajeev, your analogy of politics and sports is very accurate — but it's the root of the problem, and you have internalized this so deeply you don't realize it.
The role of the fourth estate is to be sceptic of everyone and to think critically: But in the US, because of the lack of education and because of the speed of the news cycle, we have a lot of journalists who have shitty takes all the time, and the problem is that these shitty takes constitute the bulk of what these journalists are consuming themselves, so it's a vicious cycle.
In the US, the journalists don't understand the basic phenomena they are reporting on: For instance, only in the US, is "inflation" this really weird and formless phenomena that basically nobody would know how to describe accurately — in the US, everybody has given up on understanding economics, and they only understand inflation in terms of some control that the Fed has over the economy. When you don't understand how things work, it's easy to say that everything is the source cause of inflation, or everything is going to cause inflation, etc.
When you stop understanding the world in this way, it's easy to see it only in terms of "what this side says and what that side says."
There is a lot of scientific reporting on how the media ecosystem has changed, particularly in countries in which Murdoch has had influence (Australia, the US, the UK).
It's sort of like: The news is a business but everybody (or most people in it) was in it to do good, to report and make things clearer. Murdoch (and people like him) understood that you could make much more money if you stopped caring about the mission aspect of news, and that's what led us to Fox News (and CNN, and MSNBC, and the New York Times).
The rise of fascism and authoritarianism in the US, I believe, is inversely correlated with the degradation of journalism.
Yeah sure Fox News opinion columnists are garbage. So are some MSNBC opinion columnists. But regular old reporters are fair and decent.
The ire toward the media is misplaced. The voters aren’t uninformed. We all watched January 6th even non-political people. The people that think the election was stolen won’t watch non Newsmax/Facebook/Tucker and we can’t force them to.
Stop blaming the media … start assigning responsibility to where it belongs … the people. This isn’t the 1980s where average people know little about Dukakis or Bush. Every American knows who Donald Trump is…they hitch their star to him anyway.
The overwhelming majority of actual journalists are responsible people of high integrity. But people at FOX always turned off Shepard Smith/Bill Hemmer types so they could watch O’Reilly, Tucker, Megyn Kelly, Hannity, Laura, etc. That choice is by design because people want to hear entertainment and reassurance not reality.
The people that watch CNN on a daily basis (Boris Sanchez, Wolf Blitzer, Manu Raju, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper) are informed voters. Those people that watch are an overwhelming minority.
But the rest of the people know Trump … I know a lot of them that just don’t care and are ready to vote for him again.
Rajeev: The issue of Trump/Biden is polarized, so let's pick something else.
Find me one article in the last six months from a major outlet in the US that provides any sort of explanation on inflation. Let's see how exotic a publication you have to find.
Those were 5 articles I found and perused in a total of 8 minutes. The New York Times one was the only one I couldn’t read behind a paywall but from the title and intro it was sounding mostly positive about the current economy. By the way it was published an hour ago.
There are literally hundreds of articles explaining inflation from CNN, the mainstream channels (ABC, NBC, CBS), the mainstream papers (WashPost, NYT) and from financial outlets (WSJ, CNBC, Bloomberg).
Trust me “the media” is not the problem … the voters are.
Isn’t it possible that both you and Jérémie are right? I strongly feel that both the voters and the media are the problem. They feed off each other in detrimental ways.
Actually for Trump, that has turned out to be a good strategy. He has trained people to only listen to him and to disbelieve everyone else, most particularly the "Fake News".
It's actually the opposite: He *loves* the news by default, because whether good or bad, he loves being talked about. But he has received the right to specifically decry as "Fake News" any coverage that he deems unflattering.
What you/I may find unflattering and what he may find unflattering are different things: For instance, you/I would be ashamed if a group of people were vandalizing public property in my name; for him, it's really "how does it play" that matters.
Tim Miller on The Bulwark played a recent quote from his from a rally, where he praised the coverage from some news source, which he said was a really good newspaper, unless of course, it published bad coverage in which case it would be Fake News — he said the quiet part out loud and explicitly because he knows we all know it, and he still is able to do pull it off.
Part of the explanation for that is visible with the entire "Biden resign" moment: What is stopping Biden from resigning is voters, who are at the same stage as the MAGA voters: They are at a point where they believe that *nothing* is more important than stopping the other side from winning, no matter the misgivings they might have about their candidate. When you think that, you are in a perfect position to take any psychological cover you are given that facilitates your lies.
Sure his people are like that. Democrats aren't and that's the reality. They saw that debate. I was all in for Biden till that debate. If I thought the Democrats were a cult and could pretend nothing to see here then maybe I could ride with him further. Americans, in general, are not politically informed. They aren't gonna elect the version of Joe Biden that was at that debate and Joe Biden isn't capable of reframing that image. If he was he would've done so within 72 hours of the debate.
Time to flip the script...go on offense. Throw a wild card in there like Harris. Might be worse, but it can't get a lot worse than it already is.
I think there has been a double standard since 2016. I don't think it matters because it can't be reversed. Donald Trump has moved the Overton Window. Democrats won anyway in 2020. They did better than expected in 2022. It's not fair but they need to overcome that now. Coaches always try and work the refs that is their job. But the play decides the game. Democrats will not lose this election because the media suddenly is something they weren't expecting. Democrats should've been cleared eyed about this before; I believe they were.
Home teams have the advantage...winning teams don't care. Look at the 2024 KC Chiefs.
I was referring to the 2024 Super Bowl winning Chiefs … in 2023 they had the top seed and won the AFC. But in 2024 they had to go to Buffalo as underdogs and to Baltimore as underdogs. And they balled out didn’t make excuses like their regular season loss to the Bills where they blamed the refs.
It goes like this: The media over the last three decades has suffered a lot, in ways visible and invisible. In ways visible, their business models have been decimated. The revenue has dropped considerably (https://imgur.com/a/QxGAArC), and the industry has shrunk by 1/3 in people in a decade (https://imgur.com/a/PeQdYhO). And the worst problem is "media concentration" (https://www.axios.com/2023/11/16/newspapers-decline-hedge-funds-research): What protects us most from bad editorial calls is when there are many editors that get to make the call. The diversity of different decisions is the protection against the polity paying for one especially bad call (for instance, if the New York Times were not so dominant, perhaps its choice of coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails would not have had such a dire impact).
As you will notice from the revenue graph, there was a big uptick in 2017, probably tied to Trump. Trump really gave the news another shot in the arm, but the problem is that the news — in the format adopted in the 90s, that is tied to cable news reporting, and centered around 24/7 bloviating that is weak in analysis — can be hacked and he has learned how to hack it.
The media does not want Trump to win, but Trump understands better than anybody how to use the media to win — for instance, one thing Trump has learned is that it doesn't matter if he lies, and since he knows he can get away with lies, then he can craft his message custom for anybody.
It's actually really hard to see, when you are part of an industry, when that industry is:
1. Doing bad
2. Dying
and it is really hard to know what to do, as a cog, to help correct course.
I know because my industry is academia, and between the large amount of student debt and the weak career prospects of many millennials, I think that academia has a lot to answer for. At the same time, I believe that both academia and the fourth estate have crucial roles to play in a democracy, and it's important that we imagine new models that can fix them.
In the US, our solution to problems is often economic: We create new, innovative business models. In academia, one solution could be income-share agreements (that incentivize universities to care about graduates' outcomes); and in the news, we need business models that encourage building of long-term trust with news organizations.
The coverage of Trump is a journalistic abbheration: It's completely assymetric, because The Bulwark is like "What is the media ecosystem missing? Yeah, some fluff pieces from Trump that create a veneer of consistency."
Of course, not hard hitting journalism.
For instance, despite all the fluffing, Marc "Propagandist" Caputo omits the reporting that Trump has been using automatically reoccuring donations timed at precise moments to create the appearance of outrage at specific moments.
Reporting on that would be reporting on propaganda, rather than *aiding* propaganda.
From Politico:
"GIVE AND TAKE AWAY — Our colleague Jessica Piper writes in uncovering an interesting trend on the Trump campaign: While campaigns love to tout their fundraising numbers around particular events, there is one way to help ensure you drive online giving on a specific day: Spend weeks in advance asking donors to agree to automatically give again on that date.
Recently, solicitations from Trump National Committee asked donors to check a box to donate again on July 11, which would have helped deliver a show of support when he was sentenced in New York. As soon as the sentencing was delayed, the former president’s campaign switched the magic date to July 15, which is this coming Monday.
The committee’s fundraising pages were less clear on the significance of July 15, asking only that supporters to “PLEASE DONATE BEFORE MY CRITICAL DEADLINE.” But then, yesterday, the Trump campaign switched up the appeal again, with donors now being asked to automatically send more money to the campaign on July 18, the last day of the convention, when Trump will speak."
That's the kind of thing that would be important. Marc Caputo is instead propagating the exact media portrayal that the Trump campaign wants to convey — rather than their manipulation of perception.
Marc Caputo is not a propagandist. What he reports is both accurate and in context. There is a reason why Trump is both disciplined and celebratory at this moment…he is winning. And not winning because of media … he is winning because Joe Biden flopped in his best chance to close the gap in a race he was already trailing.
Rajeev: You are not behaving like a serious person, you use a first name only, and some random avatar, and you talk about politics like sports.
In giving my pushback this article, I gave a specific example: I showed how in this specific instance, Marc Caputo is reporting the spin from Trumpworld, rather than portraying how Trumpworld spins. I gave a specific example, and illustrated how someone with supposedly less access to Trumpworld was reporting something more accurate and useful to understand how they are operating.
Your answer is simply a fanboy answer ("Marc Caputo is not a propagandist. What he reports is both accurate and in context."), and I understand how this makes sense to you in light of your previous comment in which you simultaneously: 1. Compare politics to sports, and 2. Illustrate your point with a meme clip:
If you think this article is propaganda then I don’t know what to tell you. Try the National Review or Wall Street Journal nevermind the right wing TV outlets. Trust me I’ve watched America’s Voice Network it’s crazier than Newsmax and OAN put together.
This article does not even come close to being propaganda (information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.). Mr. Caputo presents the facts on the ground from Trumpworld in advance of the convention. The quotes are legitimate perspectives from operatives. I have no doubt about the accuracy of anything in this article particularly since it mentions the many troubles that were facing Trump.
That would be like accusing Manu Raju of CNN of being a propagandist because he constantly puts a microphone in MTG or Jim Jordan’s face and gets crazy quotes from them. Marc Caputo is reporting quotes & sentiments from Trump advisors. I doubt this article would be controversial at all to the average reader.
Trump is a repulsive lying sack of sh-t. Remarkably, he at this moment seems to be in a position to again become the President of the United States and if that happens, then this nation deserves every evil thing that Trump inflicts upon it.
Hmmm! Trump disciplined? Time will tell. Long term, his ego will get in the way as it always does. And, Project 2025 will be a gift that keeps on giving, along with reproductive rights and freedoms. This 2024, not 1954.
Does that mean he’s playing golf?! You may think we are accepting passive readers but you would be seriously wrong. He’s a lazy self-impressed SOB who lies every time he opens his mouth. That may be cruise control but no cruise control we should admire!
Respectfully, please join the Hopium Chronicles for a very clear-eyed and real look at what's happening with the polling. This is still a very close and competitive race! We can win this thing! The ONLY thing that will keep us from winning is if we ALLOW ourselves to be fractured! Time to reunite behind our guy, Joe Biden. Spread the word through our networks about the jobs report in June, inflation ticking down in June, stock market at record highs! Let's be LOUD and PROUD!!!!
I've had to abandon Threads again. The absolute garment rending and teeth gnashing over there about people pointing out the obvious is just disheartening.
The Dem coalition is imploding because Biden is too old and the very online want to ignore that and ignore the polls showing Trump beating Biden.
Yup. For some reason Threads decided that what I want to read most are threads about how terrible MSNBC is, ad nauseum. I haven't abandoned it, but am now trying to fool the algorithm into giving me topics I really do want to read about :)
The prospect of more criminal convictions and possible jail time seem to have concentrated Trump's mind on the imperative to hire, listen to and follow the advice of his first professional, competent campaign co-advisors. Damn it.
Rep. Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican who flew to the Doral rally with other members of the state delegation and spent time with Trump, said it was “remarkable” to see how calm the candidate is.
I am more and more certain that t***p is on a specially formulated drug cocktail possibly adderall or ritalin or both. He still slurs his words and he still wanders off into "electric sharks" stories but the press as usual is giving him far more good coverage.
We should also remember the last time the republicans went into a convention without an announced VP pick we got Dan Quayle.
Just think of all the money the press will make with Trump in the Whitehouse again?! Every morning half of the public will wake up and immediately start looking for news of what the lunatic did while they were sleeping.
The ad revenue will be through the roof!
Except the news will not be of a "lunatic", it will be carefully controlled and censored stories about the "dear leader"
It’s long been rumored that Cubans don’t like other “Latinos” and they in turn don’t like Cubans. No surprised in that applause.
Trump has more motivation to keep disciplined, but his appartchicks don't have the same motivation. Hence the idiot who released the 350 names on the enemies list and the idiot running the Heritage Foundation and his statement about the 'bloodless' revolution if the left behaves itself. In the end Trump will get triggered and black swan himself.
Just watch his rally. He is an absolute hateful nutjob, every time he opens his mouth and more fodder for us. And the RNC convention next week will be pumping out the crazy shizzle, let's AMPLIFY.
I do watch some of his rallies. He's so repetitive it's no wonder they are not covered. The Convention should be a gold mine of political nuggets. I'm especially looking forward to Kimberly Guilfoile part two.
AB Stoddard said it best: The universe conspires in Trump’s favor. It is maddening when awful human beings get what they want. If he wins we get to watch him and his staff peacock arrogantly for four years while they burn it all down. If I didn’t care so much for my country, I’d find it a fascinating history and sociology lesson.
What’s all this talk of “softening on abortion”? I’m losing my mind reading all these pundit takes. They just added word salad about “14th amendment and life”, which is fetal personhood and is extremely radical (full abortion ban).
Trump gets the optics of being “moderate” and the most invested anti-abortion advocates will get what they want by giving Trump plausible deniability. Holy moly media is just failing massively on how they frame this.
It’s getting to the point that these newspapers and media outlets are paid by the Trump campaign. I have stopped reading NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Axios, CNN because I don’t wish to reward the dog piling with clicks.
Blaming the media is a losing strategy. Republicans have done that for a long time and it has rung hollow every time they lost a presidential election.
It’s time for Democrats to learn the lesson. The media, like referees get it wrong from time to time. But if you are getting blown out in a sports game and all you can do is blame the refs then you aren’t capable of being a winning team.
In the wisdom of the great Johnny Lawrence, it’s time for Democrats to flip the script:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S8CRFMVeIZs
Rajeev, your analogy of politics and sports is very accurate — but it's the root of the problem, and you have internalized this so deeply you don't realize it.
The role of the fourth estate is to be sceptic of everyone and to think critically: But in the US, because of the lack of education and because of the speed of the news cycle, we have a lot of journalists who have shitty takes all the time, and the problem is that these shitty takes constitute the bulk of what these journalists are consuming themselves, so it's a vicious cycle.
In the US, the journalists don't understand the basic phenomena they are reporting on: For instance, only in the US, is "inflation" this really weird and formless phenomena that basically nobody would know how to describe accurately — in the US, everybody has given up on understanding economics, and they only understand inflation in terms of some control that the Fed has over the economy. When you don't understand how things work, it's easy to say that everything is the source cause of inflation, or everything is going to cause inflation, etc.
When you stop understanding the world in this way, it's easy to see it only in terms of "what this side says and what that side says."
There is a lot of scientific reporting on how the media ecosystem has changed, particularly in countries in which Murdoch has had influence (Australia, the US, the UK).
It's sort of like: The news is a business but everybody (or most people in it) was in it to do good, to report and make things clearer. Murdoch (and people like him) understood that you could make much more money if you stopped caring about the mission aspect of news, and that's what led us to Fox News (and CNN, and MSNBC, and the New York Times).
The rise of fascism and authoritarianism in the US, I believe, is inversely correlated with the degradation of journalism.
Yeah sure Fox News opinion columnists are garbage. So are some MSNBC opinion columnists. But regular old reporters are fair and decent.
The ire toward the media is misplaced. The voters aren’t uninformed. We all watched January 6th even non-political people. The people that think the election was stolen won’t watch non Newsmax/Facebook/Tucker and we can’t force them to.
Stop blaming the media … start assigning responsibility to where it belongs … the people. This isn’t the 1980s where average people know little about Dukakis or Bush. Every American knows who Donald Trump is…they hitch their star to him anyway.
The overwhelming majority of actual journalists are responsible people of high integrity. But people at FOX always turned off Shepard Smith/Bill Hemmer types so they could watch O’Reilly, Tucker, Megyn Kelly, Hannity, Laura, etc. That choice is by design because people want to hear entertainment and reassurance not reality.
The people that watch CNN on a daily basis (Boris Sanchez, Wolf Blitzer, Manu Raju, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper) are informed voters. Those people that watch are an overwhelming minority.
But the rest of the people know Trump … I know a lot of them that just don’t care and are ready to vote for him again.
Rajeev: The issue of Trump/Biden is polarized, so let's pick something else.
Find me one article in the last six months from a major outlet in the US that provides any sort of explanation on inflation. Let's see how exotic a publication you have to find.
Exotic outlet articles:
Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-03/us-inflation-feels-bad-to-consumers-no-matter-how-you-define-it
CBS:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/inflation-up-december-cpi-report/
CNBC:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/25/gdp-q4-2023-the-us-economy-grew-at-a-3point3percent-pace-in-the-fourth-quarter.html
CNN:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/24/business/us-economy-whats-happening
New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/business/june-inflation-data.html
Those were 5 articles I found and perused in a total of 8 minutes. The New York Times one was the only one I couldn’t read behind a paywall but from the title and intro it was sounding mostly positive about the current economy. By the way it was published an hour ago.
There are literally hundreds of articles explaining inflation from CNN, the mainstream channels (ABC, NBC, CBS), the mainstream papers (WashPost, NYT) and from financial outlets (WSJ, CNBC, Bloomberg).
Trust me “the media” is not the problem … the voters are.
Isn’t it possible that both you and Jérémie are right? I strongly feel that both the voters and the media are the problem. They feed off each other in detrimental ways.
Actually for Trump, that has turned out to be a good strategy. He has trained people to only listen to him and to disbelieve everyone else, most particularly the "Fake News".
He called Chris Christie a fat pig at his one rally since the debate. He is incapable of not being disgusting, this will break through.
Boy, I sure hope you are correct - it should, we live in uncertain times.
It's actually the opposite: He *loves* the news by default, because whether good or bad, he loves being talked about. But he has received the right to specifically decry as "Fake News" any coverage that he deems unflattering.
What you/I may find unflattering and what he may find unflattering are different things: For instance, you/I would be ashamed if a group of people were vandalizing public property in my name; for him, it's really "how does it play" that matters.
Tim Miller on The Bulwark played a recent quote from his from a rally, where he praised the coverage from some news source, which he said was a really good newspaper, unless of course, it published bad coverage in which case it would be Fake News — he said the quiet part out loud and explicitly because he knows we all know it, and he still is able to do pull it off.
Part of the explanation for that is visible with the entire "Biden resign" moment: What is stopping Biden from resigning is voters, who are at the same stage as the MAGA voters: They are at a point where they believe that *nothing* is more important than stopping the other side from winning, no matter the misgivings they might have about their candidate. When you think that, you are in a perfect position to take any psychological cover you are given that facilitates your lies.
Sure his people are like that. Democrats aren't and that's the reality. They saw that debate. I was all in for Biden till that debate. If I thought the Democrats were a cult and could pretend nothing to see here then maybe I could ride with him further. Americans, in general, are not politically informed. They aren't gonna elect the version of Joe Biden that was at that debate and Joe Biden isn't capable of reframing that image. If he was he would've done so within 72 hours of the debate.
Time to flip the script...go on offense. Throw a wild card in there like Harris. Might be worse, but it can't get a lot worse than it already is.
You don't think there is a double standard by the national news media in how they cover biden v trump and dems v GOP?
I think there has been a double standard since 2016. I don't think it matters because it can't be reversed. Donald Trump has moved the Overton Window. Democrats won anyway in 2020. They did better than expected in 2022. It's not fair but they need to overcome that now. Coaches always try and work the refs that is their job. But the play decides the game. Democrats will not lose this election because the media suddenly is something they weren't expecting. Democrats should've been cleared eyed about this before; I believe they were.
Home teams have the advantage...winning teams don't care. Look at the 2024 KC Chiefs.
It started long before 2016
And it should matter; to dismiss it is silly
And it was the 2023 Chiefs, the 2024 season hasn't been played yet
I was referring to the 2024 Super Bowl winning Chiefs … in 2023 they had the top seed and won the AFC. But in 2024 they had to go to Buffalo as underdogs and to Baltimore as underdogs. And they balled out didn’t make excuses like their regular season loss to the Bills where they blamed the refs.
No; they won the 2024 SB which was the 2023 season
in 2022 they had top seed, in 2023 they were 3rd seed
I wonder what Trump did to put just about all the media in his hip pocket.
Witness the media's outrage over Joe Biden's age, and how he appears incapable of saving Democracy all by himself.
I swear, the media wants Trump to win, and they're gonna do their damned best to see that it happens.
It goes like this: The media over the last three decades has suffered a lot, in ways visible and invisible. In ways visible, their business models have been decimated. The revenue has dropped considerably (https://imgur.com/a/QxGAArC), and the industry has shrunk by 1/3 in people in a decade (https://imgur.com/a/PeQdYhO). And the worst problem is "media concentration" (https://www.axios.com/2023/11/16/newspapers-decline-hedge-funds-research): What protects us most from bad editorial calls is when there are many editors that get to make the call. The diversity of different decisions is the protection against the polity paying for one especially bad call (for instance, if the New York Times were not so dominant, perhaps its choice of coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails would not have had such a dire impact).
As you will notice from the revenue graph, there was a big uptick in 2017, probably tied to Trump. Trump really gave the news another shot in the arm, but the problem is that the news — in the format adopted in the 90s, that is tied to cable news reporting, and centered around 24/7 bloviating that is weak in analysis — can be hacked and he has learned how to hack it.
The media does not want Trump to win, but Trump understands better than anybody how to use the media to win — for instance, one thing Trump has learned is that it doesn't matter if he lies, and since he knows he can get away with lies, then he can craft his message custom for anybody.
It's actually really hard to see, when you are part of an industry, when that industry is:
1. Doing bad
2. Dying
and it is really hard to know what to do, as a cog, to help correct course.
I know because my industry is academia, and between the large amount of student debt and the weak career prospects of many millennials, I think that academia has a lot to answer for. At the same time, I believe that both academia and the fourth estate have crucial roles to play in a democracy, and it's important that we imagine new models that can fix them.
In the US, our solution to problems is often economic: We create new, innovative business models. In academia, one solution could be income-share agreements (that incentivize universities to care about graduates' outcomes); and in the news, we need business models that encourage building of long-term trust with news organizations.
The coverage of Trump is a journalistic abbheration: It's completely assymetric, because The Bulwark is like "What is the media ecosystem missing? Yeah, some fluff pieces from Trump that create a veneer of consistency."
Of course, not hard hitting journalism.
For instance, despite all the fluffing, Marc "Propagandist" Caputo omits the reporting that Trump has been using automatically reoccuring donations timed at precise moments to create the appearance of outrage at specific moments.
Reporting on that would be reporting on propaganda, rather than *aiding* propaganda.
From Politico:
"GIVE AND TAKE AWAY — Our colleague Jessica Piper writes in uncovering an interesting trend on the Trump campaign: While campaigns love to tout their fundraising numbers around particular events, there is one way to help ensure you drive online giving on a specific day: Spend weeks in advance asking donors to agree to automatically give again on that date.
Recently, solicitations from Trump National Committee asked donors to check a box to donate again on July 11, which would have helped deliver a show of support when he was sentenced in New York. As soon as the sentencing was delayed, the former president’s campaign switched the magic date to July 15, which is this coming Monday.
The committee’s fundraising pages were less clear on the significance of July 15, asking only that supporters to “PLEASE DONATE BEFORE MY CRITICAL DEADLINE.” But then, yesterday, the Trump campaign switched up the appeal again, with donors now being asked to automatically send more money to the campaign on July 18, the last day of the convention, when Trump will speak."
That's the kind of thing that would be important. Marc Caputo is instead propagating the exact media portrayal that the Trump campaign wants to convey — rather than their manipulation of perception.
It's so shameful!
Marc Caputo is not a propagandist. What he reports is both accurate and in context. There is a reason why Trump is both disciplined and celebratory at this moment…he is winning. And not winning because of media … he is winning because Joe Biden flopped in his best chance to close the gap in a race he was already trailing.
Rajeev: You are not behaving like a serious person, you use a first name only, and some random avatar, and you talk about politics like sports.
In giving my pushback this article, I gave a specific example: I showed how in this specific instance, Marc Caputo is reporting the spin from Trumpworld, rather than portraying how Trumpworld spins. I gave a specific example, and illustrated how someone with supposedly less access to Trumpworld was reporting something more accurate and useful to understand how they are operating.
Your answer is simply a fanboy answer ("Marc Caputo is not a propagandist. What he reports is both accurate and in context."), and I understand how this makes sense to you in light of your previous comment in which you simultaneously: 1. Compare politics to sports, and 2. Illustrate your point with a meme clip:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/trump-cruise-control-before-convention-calm-vp?r=ae1gh&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=61690153
There's a lot to be gained from conversing with your fellow Bulwark members here, but you are not poised to gain anything.
If you think this article is propaganda then I don’t know what to tell you. Try the National Review or Wall Street Journal nevermind the right wing TV outlets. Trust me I’ve watched America’s Voice Network it’s crazier than Newsmax and OAN put together.
This article does not even come close to being propaganda (information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.). Mr. Caputo presents the facts on the ground from Trumpworld in advance of the convention. The quotes are legitimate perspectives from operatives. I have no doubt about the accuracy of anything in this article particularly since it mentions the many troubles that were facing Trump.
That would be like accusing Manu Raju of CNN of being a propagandist because he constantly puts a microphone in MTG or Jim Jordan’s face and gets crazy quotes from them. Marc Caputo is reporting quotes & sentiments from Trump advisors. I doubt this article would be controversial at all to the average reader.
Trump is a repulsive lying sack of sh-t. Remarkably, he at this moment seems to be in a position to again become the President of the United States and if that happens, then this nation deserves every evil thing that Trump inflicts upon it.
Totally agree. I'm okay with the debate about Biden but I'm voting D no matter what so it doesn't matter when the alternative is Trump.
But as long as Joe Biden "did his best," we can all just shrug and accept what's coming.
Did the campaign provide all this info for this column?
He really did use his unhinged stuff at the Doral rally -- how did you miss it?
Seriously. Also, if we are subscribers, we DGAF about the former guy. Why write this piece if not to antagonize?