Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label death of the press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death of the press. Show all posts

Thursday, May 11, 2023

That Mess Last Night


I didn't watch Trump's whine-fest on CNN last night, because I can't watch CNN. I used to love CNN back when it was lovable - when it was the brash new kid, running around kicking over trash cans and showing the world that people will tune in for news if it's a real thing, and if there's more to it than a half-hour filled with 10-second sound bites.

One problem though, is that it showed us how 'the news' could be thoroughly corporatized, profitable, and thus profit-driven, profit-dependent, and profit-mandated.


Lincoln Project: Chris Licht’s and CNN’s Malpractice Cannot Be Repeated

May 10, 2023 – A statement from the Lincoln Project on CNN’s Trump Town Hall:

“CNN gave Donald Trump a campaign kickoff celebration tonight. Chris Licht sold out CNN’s values to chase Tucker Carlson’s viewers in a desperate attempt to find lost ratings.

“Tonight’s disaster must be a lesson that every other news organization on earth must learn: DO NOT NORMALIZE DONALD TRUMP. CNN gave Trump 90 minutes of uninterrupted air time to rewrite history and reset his own narrative. If democracy is to survive, then the media cannot follow CNN down the rabbit hole and treat Donald Trump like a ratings booster.

“Tonight we saw the MAGA Trump Cult in full regalia. Trump spewed his greatest hits of election denying, wallowing in self pity, and told lie after lie, while CNN’s hand-picked audience fawned over every answer and even laughed at his version of the sexual abuse case that he lost. Trump and his MAGA followers live in a deranged world where they are only too happy to take our nation off a cliff.

“To the other candidates in the GOP race, here’s a nickel of free advice: stop being afraid of Trump and tell it like it is. You could end his campaign now if any of you had some courage to say out loud what you are thinking, that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and doesn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. Tonight showed that trying to be clever and cute will only lead to your loss.

“This outlandish and shameful display could have been avoided and prevented. Trump is the most anti-democratic force this nation has seen for ages and we cannot afford four more years. He has called for crushing the press and throwing out the constitution. CNN’s malpractice cannot be repeated if our democracy is to survive. The stakes are simply too high.”





Thursday, December 01, 2016

Survival

I guess my main question is - Why are we always talking about 'survival'?  Maybe it's just that we're used to framing everything in terms of some epic struggle or existential threat. Maybe we need to feel better about ourselves in comparison with The Greatest Generation, so we hype everything into a looming apocalypse. Maybe we're addicted to the drama. 

Or maybe we understand that our little experiment in self-government is actually and always being undermined by people who say they love this country and its honorable institutions while doing everything in their considerable power to countervail practically everything they say they love about them.

Kali Holloway at AlterNet
“We will survive Trump,” I keep hearing people say, often followed by a reference to how “we” survived Bush, or Reagan, or Nixon, or so many other historic calamities.
At worst, I’ve seen this sentiment expressed by people whose safety and well-being are all but guaranteed, mostly to dismiss or silence outpourings of fear, anger and grief from the vulnerable and justifiably petrified. At best, I’ve heard it from folks who stand to lose the most in the coming years — whose erasure, exclusion or expulsion were voted for by people eager to make this country exclusively theirs again — in an effort to turn resignation into reassurance, to transform a history of needless suffering into a warped kind of relief that what we’re facing is just more of the awful same.
--and--
That "we" excludes more than 650,000 Americans — overwhelmingly LGBTQ men and poor people of color — who ultimately didn’t survive Reagan’s indifference to the AIDS crisis, an epidemic the president didn’t dedicate a speech to until the American death toll hit 21,000. As many as 200,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians and thousands of American soldiers didn’t survive Bush and Obama’s wars. The Obama administration's deportation of more than 2.4 million immigrants—a total that nearly rivals the previous two administrations combined—has left countless families broken and barely surviving. The misguided war on drugs launched by President Nixon and exponentially expanded by President Clinton has wasted $1 trillion, led to mass incarceration of black and brown citizens, devastated countless communities and families, and exacerbated police violence and abuse in communities that have long suffered state-sanctioned terror.

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Groundswell

David Corn talking about the Wingnuts planning to take over the whole joint.



It's a bit less scary when we learn more about it.

But something that stays a little scary for me is that "the messaging" effort (ie: Corn's point about the apparent collusion between GOP and "The Press") is pretty solid simply because we've grown accustomed to the false assertion of a "librul bias in the media".  How long have 'Conservatives' have been bitchin' about that one?  The frame's been in place for a long time, so we're ready to accept this development as just another example of Both Sides Do It.

So here's the pitch: "the media's been lying to us all along - we all know that.  We're breaking away from 'the establishment' and we're gonna tell the real truth about what the government doesn't want you to know...blah blah blah."

Another weird development is that DumFux News is starting to become identified (by some) as not being Pure Right enough.

The glimmer of hope is that these new revolutionaries can be recognized as being  different from the old ones only in the extreme levels of their hunger for power.  And the exceedingly dangerous deliciousness is that Ginny Thomas and Ted Cruz and Alan West make up the monster of the Republican id.  Created for a political purpose, the monster now turns to destroy its creators.

Here's to keeping the collateral damage to a minimum.

One more random connect-the-dots wondering:  how does Jeff Bezos buying WaPo figure into any of this?

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Today's Wingnut Media Bite

Ben Shapiro (of the epic fail "Friends of Hamas" incident) runs this:

...which leads Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs to ponder: "I think young Ben is honestly intimidated. Cowed, even. His dissent is being chilled. You can tell by the giant 73-pixel all-caps screaming headline."

That's the game these deep-fried-guano-for-brains-whiney-butt pussies play all the time.  Shapiro is so intimidated; Obama has everybody so flummoxed and shivery that...what, exactly?  If they weren't so afraid - so intimidated - they'd do something more than run their horseshit headlines in the eleventy-seven point fonts they're using now?  Like what?  What're they calling on people to do?

And when might we expect the Press Poodles to fucking call 'em on this?

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Smackin' My Forehead

Once in a while, I need somebody like Julianna Forlano to remind me - it's not about delivering content to consumers.  It's about delivering consumers to advertisers.