Weird how in these politically extreme times, the media doesn't care about policies anymore.

[DetlefK]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/17/2117241/--Even-on-Biden-s-Big-Day-He-s-Still-in-Trump-s-Long-Shadow-is-a-heck-of-a-take
lenghty opinion-piece



There is a proverb. I cannot quite remember it exactly, but it goes someting like this:
"Dumb people talk about people, average people talk about events, smart people talk about issues."

There's 1 million dead Americans. Did a national leader project the right gravitas in acknowledging that? Was it a good political move to acknowledge it? How will political opponents respond to the acknowledgement?

An interstate highway bridge collapses, causing deaths. Which political party might best be posed to capitalize on the narrative of broken infrastructure? How will political opponents respond?

A now-rapidly changing climate is creating gargantuan new western fires, drying up rivers worldwide, threatens every coastal city in every coastal state, and will in our children's lifetimes render parts of the American south functionally uninhabitable without access to air conditioning. Will a new lobbying effort by oil producers bend the narrative in favor of ignoring the problem? How will this affect political spending by the handful of Americans wealthy enough to single-handedly create new political narratives all on their own?

Flip to any "news" channel's live programs and you're not likely, during any given segment, to come away understanding more about infrastructure lifespan or the economic implications of over 1 million unexpected U.S. deaths. You're not likely to know how many schoolchildren hid under their desks today due to shots fired nearby. You won't learn which specific neighborhoods in your city are, from the standpoint of insurance companies and government experts alike, so at risk of near-future flooding that the properties will soon become functionally valueless.

You will see, however, stock footage of each thing being discussed as political experts and professional partisan narrative-builders discuss how the latest preventable deaths or brazen acts of corruption might shift the narratives of what various politicians in America might want to promote. The problem with political theater criticism is that American journalism is addicted to it as if it were opium. Every snippet of our lives that so much as brushes against government for possible solutions is huffed up by battalions of "political" journalists who compulsively report what a battalion of "political" experts-for-hire believe to be the political implications of high insulin prices, or lower insulin prices, or another grade school classroom full of bleeding-out children, or an act of violence-provoking sedition.

For the political media, issues have become inseparable from the people who talk about issues.
That's why the media is obsessed with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC... because confrontational people talking about an issue makes for an emotionally more engaging story than the issue itself.

[unblock]

1. It's not weird. It's propaganda.

The msm has a strong right-wing bias and even the more "neutral" sources are usually talking about right-wing topics using right-wing phrases and frames.

Responsible journalists don't go to sources that routinely lie. Responsible sources don't put extremists on the air. Responsible sources don't president truth and sanity as a partisan democratic position. Responsible journalism doesn't mean presenting whatever the hell republicans want to say as meriting equal respect as carefully researched democratic policy positions.


Yet this is the media we have. It's not an accident. They have their incentives, and responsible journalism is low on the list.

Right-wing policies are increasingly unpopular. So the media focuses on anything else.

[yonder]

2. +1 and Post of the Day, in my view.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. We need to break up some gigantic conglomerates. Competition results in better journalism.

Places like dailykos have grown as people recognize how homogenous tv news has become, and how little actual news comes from the conglomerates.