this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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The media report the news people want to read about/generates clicks.
Democrats and trumpers care if Biden has all high facilities. Although, both for entirely different reasons.
Democrats and just about any neutral too know that trumps mind isn't aging well either. Some will but won't get many who want to read a lot about that when its just confirming what they already believe themselves to know.
Trumpers wouldn't care if they watched a livestream of trump being lobotomised. They'd still vote for him. More so, they've been groomed to presume any and all media that speaks about trump as anything less than perfect is to be dismissed as lies and fake news. So, they won't read it either.
To me, the problem is that "the news" is the most profitable stories that will generate the most traffic. Trump being senile doesn't do that. Therefore, its not "news."
It's all click bait in some form. The news always reports the bad because that's what everyone wants to see and that's what everyone talks about. The news doesn't make money from feel good stories which is why a feel good story is tacked on at the end of the broadcast. Everything else is doom and gloom.
There's a baseline a "Trump's stupid" / "Trump's an asshole" attitude towards the guy that's persisted his he first ran in 2016. This isn't an understanding of him a actually suffering from dementia, its just a casual acceptance of any criticism lobbied at him as true because he's distasteful.
I don't think Dem (and I really don't think neutrals) perceive Trump as meaningfully medically mentally ill. And I don't think he's being investigated or covered as such. Not in the way Biden (who was showing sever cognitive decline both during and after that one Trump debate) was understood to be ill.
Trumpers don't trust the more mainstream news vendors in the same way they trust their boutique set of fascist media outlets. But if Michael Savage and OAN News and similar outlets began reporting, in earnest, that Trump was suffering sever mental decline I suspect at least some of them would listen and adjust their expectations.
The response would be very different than you'd get from a Dem or non-partisan voter. Its possible they'd "Vote Red No Matter Who" because they felt they had no better options. But their view of him would be shifted based on their media diet.
There are other things to cover that are more exciting, certainly. The coverage of RFK Jr's bizarre spoofs and goofs has captured headlines for the last week. But I don't even think this is about profit, per say. It's just the whims of the collective consciousness of news editors.
Dementia is a long way from a mind that isn't aging well and he does seem particularly unhinged to me, even by his standards. I'm not sure why you'd jumped from one to the other and then argue against that instead.
Thats certainly something his supporters say.
The problem is, footage of trump, more often than not, confirms those stories or close enough for no one to care about the difference. However, his supporters cling to any minor deviation from their "version", using them as a claim that the whole thing is a lie and a giant conspiracy against trump.
They've been utterly inoculated against any truth they dont like about trump. So much so that they won't even bother to reading anything that isn't something they already know is pro trump. Which is my point here.
I agree that people have already made up their mind about trump, based on his own behaviour and words, but thats a far cry from any accusation is true because he's distasteful, as an attitude.