The Streisand Defect

[email protected]

There is too much blame to go around, and not enough people and orgs wanting to acknowledge blame.

Trump did not become a household name randomly. He was helped and aided by many. And I have noticed hundreds of times how the main stream media enabled his word salad and gave it meaning and power. In real life, not many people listen to blathering hateful idiots.

[email protected]

This take only works if the new media is reporting on Trump accurately and factually.

The problem is that they are not. Organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post spend most of their wordcount trying to wrangle the vile nonsense that Trump is spewing into something intelligent and legible, often by lying or misrepresenting his words. They're not reporting his atrocities, they're whitewashing them, and we should absolutely call that out as complicity.

[email protected]

They’re not reporting his atrocities, they’re whitewashing them, and we should absolutely call that out as complicity.

I agree with that but that's not generally the criticism leveled at the media for their coverage of Trump's awful and outrageous statements.

Basically you're saying the media should cover Trump more and more critically. OP's comic is suggesting that the media is blame for giving Trump coverage, for reacting to Trump.

[email protected]

Can you provide some examples of WaPo articles that did this? Everything I read that I can recall listed his statements in context and gave the actual facts.

[email protected]

Trump supporters have been buying out networks and social media to support him. If they weren't for him before they are now.

[email protected]

Meanwhile, the Business As Usual Party has decided that their only mistake was that they didn't stick closely enough to their usual 1992 playbook.

Internal critics point to ignoring vulnerable people who weren't widely accepted as standard humans in 1992 in stead of actively vilifying them as their biggest mistake.

True to form, they then warmly welcomed their new fascist overlords in between receiving legal bribes from billionaires and their corporations to be extremely weak when negotiating for workers and generous towards said billionaires when writing legislation and regulations.

[email protected]

Wasn't it the CEO of NBC at the time who said in 2016 "Trump is bad for America but great for us"?

[email protected]

Exactly how I felt about it as it was happening, fucking stop talking about his bullshit! We know he's bad news!

[email protected]

I guess you're right. For the comic to really be accurate, it'd need a panel with the news saying "Awful man has solid ideas and policy regarding the economy."

[email protected]

I make my livin' off the evenin' news.
Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use.
People love it when you lose.
They love dirty laundry.

[email protected]

Except that is not what is being found now. Actually, many people who voted for him didn't actually know anything about his "bad news" because they didn't watch the sources that were actually reporting on the truly bad stuff and now they are finding out and are regretting their decisions. In the days after the election Google reported a spike in searches related to "Changing your vote USA".

[email protected]

I remember reading about that too. I wonder where the truth lies in all this.

[email protected]

This song is proof nothing has changed in over forty years.

[email protected]

As I remember the sources we saw it in were in the reputable realm. I also think think many of these people voted for him to vote against Kamala (or against a woman) but didn't actually think he would win because their vote didn't matter.

[email protected]

You mean exactly how Lemmy treats Elon Musk?

[email protected]

No, he is just objectively a terrible human being.

[email protected]

"Enough Musk Spam! People give him WAY too much attention!"

also

"look at his new project? what a idiot"

"did you see his new tweet? (not calling it X )"

"look at this photo of him at this event he's aging lol!"

[email protected]

The thing is, it's not even what's depicted in the comic. The media constantly softballed Trump. While some of his success, especially initially in 2015/16, can be attributed to "No publicity is bad publicity", the fact also is that the media at large was unwilling to call out Trump's bullshit for what it was, because it would lose them part of their viewer base for very little gain.

Bakkoda

Unwilling is one way to put it. Complicit as hell is how i would say it. Every phrasing of every headline i have seen for years now has been manufactured to share blame, shield blame or outright place blame where it doesn't belong. Slap "sources say" on the end and you apparently can say whatever you want.