Matt Taibbi is partly wrong and partly right. He has the Left's misunderstanding about Trump and his beliefs. But he understands, like no one else in the Liberal Press understands, that the media are committing political suicide.
When Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015, it would have been easy enough for members of the media to decry his ignorance, personal and professional venality, and racism.
But they couldn’t help themselves, declaring every word out of his mouth a Satanic lie. This made the occasional things that he said that were true, like that Jeb Bush was a puppet for corporate donors or NATO was a bloated and outdated organization, pack significantly more punch.
The transparent full-of-shitness of the corporate press reaction to Trump was probably the leading argument for his credibility. Trump wrongly pushed voters to blame minorities and foreigners, and when he did identify correct targets for public opprobrium, like Goldman Sachs, it wasn’t believable that he would oppose them in office. But media figures gave his “drain the swamp” message a huge boost by scoffing at it with their inimical obnoxiousness.
They then spent years doubling down, backing conspiracy theories about espionage with Russia, mis-predicting the end of the Trump presidency, and, yes, employing tactics like body–language analysis to say all sorts of silly things (“What is Donald Trump hiding? His body language says it all,” wrote Newsweek, interviewing an analyst who’d made “interesting observations about Hitler’s salutes”).
People in the media business underestimate, by a lot, the damage the last three years have done to their ability to reach not just Trump fans but non-Trump Republicans, independents, libertarians, Greens, and other groups. The latest fiascoes with Sanders double as confirmation for these people of their worst conclusions about media, and an additional insult that such goofball messaging is only now attracting the notice of some on the “other side. “
Sanders now looks poised to receive the same kind of bump Trump got in 2016 from media stupidity. As was the case this past summer when the Bezos-owned Washington Post went so far as to put the term “corporate media” in quotation marks while denouncing Bernie’s “bogus media beef,” the institutional dismissal has been so over-the-top that it’s likely to earn him sympathy even with disinterested parties. Is there a word for propaganda in reverse?
1 comment:
The media has lost any relevance to the vast middle or the right. We see the dinosaur media dying. It fails for for sort of recognition-it gets nothing. On the Left it is acknowledged but not considered "woke" enough. As it goes further left it alienates more and more people. But there are few thinking people on the Left. I mean 98 genders? The concept that merit and excellence are secondary to diversity? That gender is an artificial construct? These are beliefs that rational people do not entertain.
But the Left depends on emotions, not thinking much less reason.
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