From the "We Fucking Told You So" file (it's a big file), it turns out that the lords and ladies of the American political media suck every bit as comprehensively as we always knew they did.
We on the Left have always known that the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism is the state religion of the Beltway and that, instead of actual "news", what we see on the teevee and hear on the radio and read in print almost every day are merely acts of compulsory tithing to the dogma of that depraved cult.
Now, the Washington Post reports on just how far down that rat-hole the media has fallen:
Study: Clinton-Trump coverage was a feast of false equivalencyBy Erik Wemple December 7U.S. media organizations are locked into such a negative mind-set that they portrayed Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as equally pernicious and scurrilous pretenders to the presidency. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Thomas E. Patterson in the fourth of his series of studies on media coverage of the presidential campaign for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.“False equivalencies abound in today’s reporting,” writes Patterson. “When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news...
And who does the article spotlight as the poster-kids for this reeking, ruinous mendacity?
Yep...(emphasis added):
...On the May evening when the general-election matchup became clear, NBC News’s Chuck Todd riffed that Clinton would follow Trump to the “low road.” Yet no one captured the mood of false equivalency more tightly than ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd: “Either you care both about Trump being sexual predator & Clinton emails, or u care about neither. But don’t talk about one without the other,” he wrote in a Nov. 1 tweet.
This is where millions of Americans who don't know any better -- who ordinary pay no more attention to politics than they pay to the fate of the Hubble telescope -- stop by for a few minutes every so often to pick up a six-pack of Dowd/Todd-brand poison labeled as Very Serious Political Opinions.
Ought to be crime to do what these people do.
8 comments:
It is a crime as is the fact that all the rest of the so called "journalists" let it slide.
Suicide watch isn't a metaphor: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/12/09/daily-202-trump-over-performed-the-most-in-counties-with-the-highest-drug-alcohol-and-suicide-mortality-rates/584a2a59e9b69b7e58e45f2e/?utm_term=.aabd758fe91a
As one exist poll showed, people who equally mistrusted Trump and Clinton overwhelming voted for Trump.
Both Sides delivers Republicans the Privileged-Enough-To-Not-Care and There-is-an-Election? vote.
Sorry for the OT comment but necessity prevails.
Mrs. JP and I are really in a bad way this holiday season. If it's at all possible, please make a donation to Welcome Back to Pottersville. Details are here.
I can't wait to see these folks get good paying gigs in the Ministry of Truth.
Oh, who the fuck am I kidding. As a society, we deserve the meteor. We deserve it because we've obviously gone very, very wrong somewhere down the line and need to be cleansed.
We devalued education and critical thinking.
We turned respect of those worthy of it into a popularity contest.
We turned patriotism into nationalism and xenophobia.
We started thinking that skill and talent in a trade were worthless.
We screamed for low price over craftsmanship and value.
We turned to the dark side.
Our republic was a good gig while it lasted.
@BongoShaftsbury 1:
To which I respond, "Please proceed salt of the earth Real Americans"!
The barn door opened and the horses fled when we stopped teaching critical thinking skills.
Simple doodad reasoning skills prevents Both Siderism, Bullshit, sophistry and the like from getting any traction.
To quote from Isaiah 5:13:
"Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge: and their honorable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst."
Translation: The people are fucked because they are stupid.
Meanwhile, they're so hemmed in by this false equivalency stuff that they even have to do it to individual subjects. Sure, he's a white supremacist, but he's dapper! We have no idea why he committed this massacre of women, even though he left behind a manifesto saying he hates women and wants to kill them! He's not a climate change denialist, he's an "ally of the fossil fuels industry." He's not a procurer for fascists, he's a "conservative firebrand"! We have to be fair to these people, after all...
I wrote a thing about what this is and why it matters and what it's going to do to all of us. Enjoy...
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