Trump is great for readership. It’s guaranteed he’ll do something controversial and horrific pretty much every single day, pulling in all kinds of readers who stay engaged with doom scrolling and trolling comments. Even the ones who hate Trump still kinda want him around like poking at a bruise or picking a scab.
I wonder if they have actual numbers to prove it for the four years Trump was in office. Many people were probably suffering from news fatigue, because it was like a goddamn daily/weekly thing of him saying/doing something stupid/controversial for FOUR YEARS STRAIGHT. Literally every single goddamn day I would look at the TV or computer screen like, “What the fuck?” Shitty for the world, but I wonder if it was a Golden Age for news media outlets.
I definitely took a long break from shit posting because who can compete with the press secretary’s shit posts? Deleted accounts and cursed at clouds. I do not miss those days.
Not a terrible hypothetical
There’s no fixing this country. I’ll vote for the band-aid yet again in Biden, just like last time and Clinton before, but we’re bleeding out and Biden pulling it out won’t change that, only buy a little more time with no path to not bleeding out.
The people without meaningful capital, most people, have literally no unequivocal advocates with significant power, even Biden straddles the line of trying to play to us while appeasing the political briber class.
They own the means of production, state violence, mass media propaganda, and even set curriculum from K-Colleges of economics to indoctrinate us to be our blatant con-game of an economy’s defenders.
Things will continue to decline until the people accept this and revolt, or far more likely, our rigged market capitalist con-game collapses having conquered the board and having no new unexploited markets to metastasize/grow with. Our wealthiest will be fine, don’t worry, none have loyalty to any nation-state, and they all have temperate places of escape to avoid the consequences of their actions, alls well that ends well for the ones that matter.
The capital markets that own you and I don’t care what their middle managers in DC do to us, only what DC can funnel to them.
If that means glorious profit from rage clicks as Trump gets PEASANT women arrested for abortions and PEASANT minorities murdered by his mobs with impunity, don’t worry significant capital holders will be immune as usual, then our capitalist owners only have one thing to say: “you had us at glorious profit.”
And don’t forget kids, market capitalism is the only way. That’s why we used our intelligence agencies and military to topple entire regimes attempting something else for more than half a century to keep those markets open for our capitalist’s exploitation, because market capitalism is the only way. Any other economic system will fail, we’ll continue to use every tool at our disposal to make sure of that.
I second what Nudding said. This was emaculately well written, and I am thankful for having the opportunity to read it. You perfectly elucidated the existential angst of everyone who is paying attention to the slow motion collapse of Amerikan Empire.
You have a lovely way with words. People can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and that’s one of the reasons why we will fail.
I appreciate that, sincerely.
This is like the fourth time I’ve seen you comment something unfathomably based.
Depressing as it is, I couldn’t agree more. I fear for the future of our country.
Trump is easy to manipulate and he loves the ultrawealthy, doesn’t understand jack shit and cares nothing for regulations or safety, just profit.
So yes, people like Rupert Murdoch want him to be president and will try their darndest
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From what I read Murdoch was actually super anti-Trump,
Really?
I believe you, but seems rather counterintuitive. Although he is Australian born, so perhaps he just lacks the shortsightedness of his American peers?
Fox had help. CNN did its part.
Why wouldn’t he hate Trump. Trump stole his whole movement and handed it to white supremacists. Not that he’s not a white supremacist but it was his hate platform first.
was actually super anti-Trump
my understanding was he became super-anti-trump towards the end of trump’s administration due to the constant fuckups and idiocy. was not that way originally.
It makes their jobs easier. Ragebait, MAGA-Stans, Lashing out, & politicians slamming one another. Political media has all become grocery store tabloid and reality tv trash…all that shit is easy to produce and doesn’t require any substance of value.
Yes? They love him because he gets them clicks and eyeballs. They don’t seem to realize that critical pieces would get just as many without being pieces of shit.
At least CBS’ former CEO was honest about it.
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
I really think that’s the answer. No deep conspiracy, just money. I looked it up today, and NYT subscriptions fell off a cliff as soon as Biden took office. Chaos means newspaper subscribers and cable news viewers. The fate of the country be damned, there’s money to be made off of four more years of daily outrages and instability.
No shit, billionaires own all of the news outlets. They need the masses to stay fucked
Chaos is a ladder
You don’t have to pretend that the press actually believes that Biden’s age, memory or trustworthiness with classified documents are actual issues
Those things should be issues. There should be half a dozen serious primary challengers running against Biden. There should be more than two parties with a chance of winning, and an electoral system that lets people vote for them without increasing the risk of their worst possible outcome.
But we don’t have any of that. We have a Biden/Trump rematch, so I’ll vote for Biden and drink a lot of whisky afterward.
Yes, the press loves Trump. Gets views, and engagement, Trump knows this and makes fun of them for it saying they would be out of business if it weren’t for him
They’re using the same old playbook. It has to be a horse race to keep tension up for eyes and clicks. It’s media dollars, that simple.
again.
You forgot the “again” part.
Have we forgotten how much air time the “billionaire” / “reality tv host” / “real estate mogul” got during the 2016 election? While everyone else was out getting donations to run ads for their campaign, the “press” used Trump’s fame to increase their viewership and advertising revenue. They didn’t talk about policy, they didn’t do deep dives or hardball interviews with the candidates, they didn’t do their job as the fourth pillar of democracy; they talked about the crazy antics and repulsiveness of the ‘this guy can’t be for real’ candidate. Of course the press wants Trump to win. No one watches the news (anymore) to learn things or to feel good about things.
You cannot engage the frames the press traffics in because it knows the best way to reach the maximum audience is to give Republicans what they want and drive liberals to hate reading, hate sharing, and even hate subscribing. Because even by rebutting them, you spread and strengthen them. That’s just how brains work.
That’s not how “the press” is supposed to work. Toying with your emotions for profit is how television programming and circus sideshows work.
Who’s holding the media accountable for fucking us over? Who among us are voting with our wallets and our eye balls and giving actual journalists a fighting chance against these newstainment programs and meme posts and social media click bait faux-headlines?
Right, no one. Because no one actually cares about The News and policy and how politicians and corporations are having an impact on our country. That’s too difficult to digest compared to lashing out at a headline that makes us feel upset. Of course I exaggerate by saying “no one” cares but it might as well be since those who care aren’t the ones watching newstainment and newstainment is raking it in appeasing to the mass of nobodies.
All advertisement driven media are to blame. Journalism is dead.
Journalism is dead
Yep, buried between the arts and empathy, just behind public education. If you see the social contract’s headstone, you’ve gone too far.
Man, the private profit motive sure does love killin.
Sure as shit has felt like it over the last 9 (holy fuck, it’s been that long?) years.
I don’t think they’re trying to help trump per se. I absolutely believe they’re trying to foster outrage politics. and they are willfully ignorant of what they are reporting just so they can gain/maintain access. and they are so scared shitless of being labeled “liberal” that they are bending over so far backwards they’re facing front again that they normalize or equate everything a republican does to a democrat when it’s clear one is not the same level of scandal.
these are the same people who tell us that the people who frequent “this ohio/illinois/indiana/iowa diner” are more real americans than people who live in cities are.
doing all of that benefits trump. but I think that’s a side effect of the real problem. when you are catering to a homogenous audience and trying to pass it off as something that is the pulse of the country you’re going to get this type of unbalanced coverage.
Yes.
