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Mainstream media benefits from another trump presidency. Trump drives ratings. Ratings means sponsors, sponsors mean revenue, revenue means shares going up.
They are corporations, not services. It's illegal for them to not do what helps their shareholders.
Mainstream media benefits from another trump presidency.
It’s illegal for them to not do what helps their shareholders.
This has been repeatedly shown false. They have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, not a legal one. As Tim Apple once told an investor asking about gains on their push for environmental greenness as a company, he told them that if all they want is for the number to go up they should get out of the stock.
Cook then offered his own bottom line to Danhof, or any other critic, one which perfectly sums up his belief that social and political and moral leadership are not antithetical to running a business. “If that’s a hard line for you,” Cook continued, “then you should get out of the stock.”
Corporations do not have to prioritize profit above everything. The old case where that was in question is quite nuanced and worth reading about.
Businesses also have wide latitude in how they interpret profit mandate. They're allowed to make purely gut-driven predictions and take huge risks with little evidence on the grounds that a payoff is on the horizon.
Tim Cook could blandly assert that environmental greenness does increase profits and then just hand wave in some fuzzy math about hypothetical waste management or non-renewable material costs or public sentiment. And who could argue with him over a 20 year time horizon?
You can say whatever you want as a CEO and most people will reflexively trust you simply because you're in a position of authority.
They ARE services. They're not services run for the benefit of the public.
I think we all got a little messed up by the few years that journalism had a bit of credibility. For the vast vast vast majority of humans on earth all forms of mass communication have been propaganda for those in power.. I mean look at the Catholic Church for the best modern example
Yea it's now an election of the old school vs new school and the passing of the torch. Boomers are going down kicking and screaming
I make my livin' off the evenin' news Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use
I think that's a good point. I wonder if reasonable politicians should prepare a few outlandish talking points to give the media something tasty to sink their teeth into. Like do a normal interview saying normal thoughtful and nuanced things, but also throw in a couple specific wacky clickbait nuggets so the media has what they crave for their news cycle.
Like, what if Kamala had worked this into her interview: Once his criminal trials are over, I don't think imprisonment in Attica would be appropriate for Trump as an ex president.
Leave it at that and have the media frenzy over it, even though it means nothing. Then they won't spend as much time trying to invent drama over her interview because she gave them some drama to go with.
I think that's what Trump is best at. Trump knows most of his base are dumb and the media are thirsty clickbait whores, so he treats his interviews with the decorum of a 2-bit bordello and ends up getting tons of attention that works for his base.
I feel that would only fuel the misinformation machine with more fake news. I’d be interested in knowing your rationale and how you feel it would be beneficial to anybody except the news organizations.
I'm talking about controlling the narrative a bit more. Dems are masters at speaking ineffectively and letting the media decide the narrative. And the media spends half its time reacting to whatever outlandish thing Trump said. And Trump says the outlandish stuff on purpose to control the narrative.
So 80% of the time we are in this cycle: Trump says something insane on purpose -> media reports it like it's half presidential and worth talking about -> Dems are asked to comment on it -> Dems try to ignore it or reply something sensible that gets buried.
The effect is this: Trump controls the narrative -> the whorish media is happy to repeat his BS and normalize him for clicks -> whatever Dems want to talk about doesn't matter. Low effort voters see Trump and his message everywhere courtesy of the whorish media. Trump remains a viable candidate.
I'm proposing that Dems could try to join the cycle at the input level instead of the tail end. If they say some aggressive or outlandish things about Trump, they'd be trend setters at the start of the cycle instead of irrelevant at the end of it. Like what happened with the "weird" thing, when seemingly by accident the Dems landed one narrative origination that left Trump on the receiving end unable to shake it.
My point is that this shouldn't happen by accident. The Dems should plan it as part of narrative control. Keep a schedule and say another big thing once per week. Give the media something big to talk about, keep an aggressive message on Trump and his prosecutions, crimes, terrible policies and so on. Anything that controls the narrative, puts Trump on the defensive, and makes the media spread the Dems message instead of giving Trump free publicity.
When the Dems choose not to do this, they are letting the media decide what narrative they want and the media will always prefer to go with sensationalized BS as much as possible, which usually means going over to Trump to say something insane so they have more fodder to normalize and talk about for clicks.
I’m not usually one to take this stance, but just because the Republicans are doing it does not mean the Democrats should too.
It seems to me that your main reason for your stance is that you feel the Republicans do these outlandish things, which makes them “newsworthy” and stand out in the crowd, while the Democrats are left sitting in the back mumbling like they’re Milton from Office Space. You think that if they start saying their own outlandish things, it’ll somehow balance the scales in the news media and get people back to paying attention to the Democrats and focusing on their real agenda.
The way I see it is that Republicans, while loud, are very much not well respected by most anybody that makes a difference to the Democrats. In other words, acting like Republicans to get attention would be counterproductive as it would greatly offend their base. You don’t win an argument by being louder than your opponent. You definitely don’t win when your answer is to model “I know you are, but what am I” responses.
If anything, no one wins an argument at all. What you want to do is to flip the narrative by remaining calm, focusing on the facts, and pointing out the flaws in your opponents arguments. You repeat what they’ve said, ask them to explain it further or that you don’t understand what they mean, and then hold them accountable for their responses.
It seems like we are talking about different things.
Also,
What you want to do is to flip the narrative by remaining calm, focusing on the facts, and pointing out the flaws in your opponents arguments.
We know with well-tested confidence that that does nothing for half the electorate.
Or more than half of the electorate. There are dems on lemmy that want blood and conflict, who would rather see trump killed instead of being defeated in an election and being sent to prison. There are independents who will vote for whoever appears "stronger" on video as opposed to who is more likely to work for their interests. The position of president has been "who the american people (and remember, corporations are people) love from their media exposure to said candidate" far more than "who has the best policy" for a long time
You're replying to a song lyric
I’m not sure Trump actually has any idea what’s going on around him. His nonsense just doesn’t get caught by the equally stupid base so he looks like he’s playing them. The only people that would support him are the dumbest people imaginable so it’s like saying I’m a skilled athelete based solely on the fact that I can absolutely obliterate my competition…which just so happens to be a bunch of toddlers.
This isn’t to say he’s not a massive threat and that the base won’t vote him in if Americans don’t vote against him but let’s not give him any undue credit here.
People love it when you lose. Give us dirty laundry.
It's a low bar. If we're now judging candidates in comparison to Trump then we're in trouble.
Trump isn't the standard. He's an anomaly, and we should aim way higher.
Lol, name the last Republican President that wasn't a moron.
Roosevelt
https://ictnews.org/archive/theodore-roosevelt-the-only-good-indians-are-the-dead-indians
Morality wise, the last good Republican was Grant.
For intelligence it's Nixon imo. Tricky Dick didn't get where he was by being a moron, evil isn't stupid.
Eisenhower very definitely wasn't stupid either.
I don't agree. A scale has to be useful for separating what you're measuring. Any scale that puts Kamala as "low" is like trying to measure the size of a banana and an orange in kilometers, they'll both measure "low". There is no decent measure by which Trump is anything but scum. Kamala (or just about anyone who isn't a Trump voter) ranks so far above Trump that they can't be anything under "excellent" on a scale designed to meaningfully compare these candidates.
Obviously the scale we should be using for our politicians SHOULD be better, and that's because we should have produced better candidates. With the candidates we have, we don't get to use a better scale because in doing so we'll be playing right into Republican narrative of "they're both the same" or Kamala is "low" quality so vote for Trump.
Well, Trump did make a ton of people madly follow him.
It may be leading the world to ruin, but it is still leading.
I'd put the impact rating as "high".
The direction being undesirable.
Which pundits actually said that? Most of what I've read, people were saying she did pretty well. But you sure got people here believing this meme.
Fox news. Daily beast. Daily Mail. etc. The usual suspects. But no matter what she said or did, they were going to bash her. If she were the 2nd coming they would say she was a "trans ultra-left authoritarian".
The winner of a political debate is whoever the audience likes more. It unfortunately has nothing to do with being a reasonable person.
It's fucking absurd and embarrassing that crowd participation is even permitted in televised presidential debates.
This is the folly of representative democracy. It inevitably becomes less about policy and instead a popularity contest between figureheads.
Representative democracy has run its course, and the problems it solved (the fact that it's not practical for everyone to attend places of government from far away) have all but been solved by technology. Bring on direct democracy.
Media is a circus. Dont clown around or stick head in the lions mouth and youre gonna get a low score
of course they did, they don't understand shit and need to drum up literally anything to get clicks lmao
When the other candidate's performance is "rock bottom", "low" is a massive step up. Not doing the listed things shouldn't raise the evaluation to "high", because that's the bare minimum.
I was under the impression that we all know that nearly all media pundits are greedy and suffer from some form of dementia or other brain disease.
That's a lot of things she didn't do.
She also clarified her stance on Israel i.e. exactly the same as Biden, full support for genocide.
Yeah idk why you're getting downvoted, that was one of the most disappointing parts of it.
She could have tried to wriggle around it a bit more rhetorically but she just went "I'll bang my head against the wall with Israel just like we've been doing till now."
In general it was a pretty bad showing from Harris, and Walz did only a bit better.
The downvotes are because that topic matters a lot, but it's also used to try to force people to become single issue voters, so they'll vote against her, all the while knowing that Trump loves genocide too, but let's not mention that.
So if you wanna attack Harris on that issue, please do. You should. But remember to include Trump's stance as well, if you're trying to talk about an upcoming election.
Or hey, do whatever you like, right? It's just that simplistic comments often get simplistic responses (i.e., downvotes).
I feel like having to preface evert criticism of dems with "Trump is worse but..." seems pretty silly.
I generally consider Republican candidates and ideas non-starters. Not even worthy of consideration. When I criticize Democrats, the "Trump is not an option" is implied.
But then your comments are identical to those posted by people whose goal is to undermine democratic support through single issues in order to create voter apathy and let Trump win.
It's not the message people are downvoting it's the effect. If you don't do anything to separate your message from this type of malicious attack, it'll unfortunately be taken as that.