Make the US Politics Thread Great Again

Their behaviour has been normalised by the US press is it any wonder.

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I think Trump has gone mad.

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Britain First vids are a media beat up. Not Nazi

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How S Huckabee-Sanders hasn’t done an M “Ahhh… bugger it. I’m done” Meninga yet is very surprising. Never before has the White House Press representative had to work so hard.

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"White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the President, saying it didn’t matter if the videos were real or not.

“I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing. The threat is real and that’s what the President is talking about, is the need for national security, the need for military spending and those are very real things; there’s nothing fake about that” "

Keeping a straight face whilst delivering that to a room full of national media folks is a pretty impressive effort.

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He likes insulting allies.

Of course, this ignores the fact that it is on record they decided to stone wall all Obama legislation from even before he started in the office. Hard to get any policy wins when you refuse to work with the other side and are the minority…

On the mainstream media. I think there are things they unfairly get the blame for, and others not. They have definitely pushed a line of making “big news” of everything, so that it becomes very hard to know what is today’s minor event being pushed big for clicks versus, actually, today’s news is really really big! They have also not always had the level of self-checking we would hope for, although in my view this is far more often due to budget cuts than bias (and I’m not including Fox News and conservative radio as MSM. With them its bias).

But there is also the issue that people don’t want to consume uninteresting media, or get nuance any more. You say the media had a go at McCain and Romney like they were Trump, and you are right that they weren’t him. But they did push the same policies. Both had to move so far to the right to win the Republican primary that it was very clear both were running on a similar policy basis as Trump. Not quite as extreme, but then the media wasn’t as extreme as Trump. And Palin was every bit as extreme as Trump.

The problem is, nuancing a discussion to say that Romney/McCain are not so bad per se, but their policy position which they’ve staked out to win the Republican primary is terrible, is just too complicated.

One other headache is that the media loves free hits. They’ll show and promote Trump’s grand daughter talking in Chinese at the presentation, and also any own goal. When you have Trump, Bush and Palin (and others) doing own goals as often as they do, its no wonder they get a lot more air time than Obama did. When Trump is writing the media’s headlines for him in twittersphere, of course they take him up on showing how silly he’s being again. Of course, that all then feeds into the right’s argument that the media is picking on Trump more. Its not the only reason (they’re also writing more because his policies are diabolical and he’s making the USA a laughing stock), but it certainly adds to it.

Your points on people moving to insular news that supports only their views is also spot on. And people then want to refute anything evidence based over “what they’ve heard”.

My reference to McCain and Romney wasn’t about endorsing a particular idealogy or lionizing them as perfect, more that they are not lunatics lacking the intellect, application, stability, knowledge, respect, or compassion required for the position.
That was as far as the statement of support was meant to be read.

Re: the media: I think we are seeing an over-correction to their past mistakes in the form of the “fake news” reactionary cry.

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Agree, those who see nothing wrong with those posts of his surgical boots and assertions that he was never a POW, the birther stuff about Obama, should not complain about the cheap shots at Trump

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An interesting article on the media, from a discussion between the Journalist and a Republican who was a member of the Reagan and Bush 1 whitehouses. Fair warning, its Salon so the journalist is definitely biased (and it shows with some of the premises of the questions), and the republican was against Trump, so would be pretty moderate by today’s reckonings. The catchy title is virtually not discussed in this either.

gop-insider-bruce-bartlett-the-republican-party-needs-to-die

One interesting bit:

Sarah Huckabee - not talented enough to get a job at McDonald’s as a drive through cashier, so ends up as Press Secretary for the orange ■■■■■■■■.
Still have to admire how she can deliver thecrap that she does in a serious manner

Sarah Huckabee !

I wonder what her nickname was at school.

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You don’t think places like CNN, Time, NYT, WP, etc aren’t biased?

If you lean even remotely right then you read and watch those places and you will find they are as biased as Fox is, just left biased.

I doubt most media have the ability to be balanced very often. Too much money at stake to be balanced these days.

CNN/NBC/Wapo/NYTimes etc got a lot of mileage out of going after Hillary Clinton for her mistakes. It was wall to wall 24/7. Wall to wall Clinton!! is FoxNews response to any bad story about Trump.

Shep Smith is an exception at Fox. There is at least one other that I have noticed but her name escapes me at present.

So I agree with the premise that all media orgs have their biases, but not that these things are equally impactful on coverage.

Dude

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I don’t watch Fox tbh, never have. I do read a lot of CNN and NYT. They have some good quality work, but there is a lot of absolute tripe in there as well.

Nature of the modern beast that is still called journalism.

It’s the nature of people, not journalism. No point holding out for perfection.

How can you equate Fox and CNN et al if you’ve never watched the former?

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Several days after the President of the USA re-tweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos from a fringe right wing extremist group, and I’m still finding the new normal quite surreal. Imagine being one of the 3.3 million Muslims in the USA and having your ‘leader’ behave like this.