• psvrh@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    It’s more that the media is not equipped to deal with Trump.

    They’ve always depended on balance for credibility, and that doesn’t work when one side is blatantly disingenuous. The media will still try to appear balanced, and even that’s not enough because accurate reporting of someone like Trump comes off as accusatory because he’s just that corrupt and incompetent.

    The result is that the media attention whitewashes and minimizes his transgressions and inflates his opponents’ in an attempt to appear balanced. It also gives his odious ideas oxygen and thusly the appearance of approval and credibility.

    That’s why the current Democratic strategy of mocking him and calling him “weird” is working, because it’s explicitly not normalizing his behaviour or giving his message a platform.

    • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      They’ve had decades to adapt to Republicans being blatantly disingenuous. At what point does it stop being “not equipped to deal with” and does it start being “chooses not to deal with”?

      Private media are owned by shareholders that want as many unfair advantages as possible. They want to be slightly left of center to appeal to the “reasonable centrist” crowd, but they want the center to be as far to the right as possible so their taxes are low and their assets unregulated. Moreover, they want the presidential election to be as close to 50-50 as possible so both candidates are desperate for bribe money and and willing to pay further favors.

      If the Democrats win by a landslide, what is next? What is the new political center, and what does that mean for the stock market? Even in the face of fascism, corporations and shareholders keep playing both sides, because if Volkswagen and BMW and Ford and Siemens and Kodak and IBM and Bayer and the Associated Press and Hugo Boss and Fanta/Coca-Cola and all the unnamed German millionaires that hid their cash and pillaged Jewish artifacts in Switzerland and politely surrendered to the western forces made it through being Nazis with a profit, why expect worse from Trump?