Campaign 2020 media coverage, science forum consideration

Discussion in 'Politics' started by iceaura, Feb 20, 2019.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    When the Republican rewriting of history meets a somewhat more accurate ( i.e."left") memory:


    The history of the post-Reagan Republican Party's various disasters has been successfully hidden and camouflaged and revised - Trump is stressing the system, but there's no particular reason he can't get away with what he's doing.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    As predicted by the largely unpaid and abuse-targeted analysts from the American center and left, as the latest Republican federal administration and Congress goes tits up and begins to rot the historical record of it is being buried and the media's handling of it rewritten to abet amnesia.

    As predicted, the US media is being joined by its critics in claiming
    1) Trump is an aberration,
    2) the incompetence and criminality and corruption of the US governments at all levels are the fault of everyone/both sides/Ds and Rs/etc equivalently; the hypnotic frame that will allow the Republican Party to avoid accountability in the aftermath of this latest disaster
    3) the people who failed to stop or prevent what they were opposed to and trying to stop or prevent are as responsible for the outcomes of the policies and actions they failed to prevent as those who promoted and carried out those actions. This is claimed even of those who were actually punished or penalized for their opposition.
    4) Until Trump appeared, the Republican presidents and Congressmen were normal, responsible, standard issue political electees; the media coverage of them likewise.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/trump-immigration-tweet-new-york-times.html
    https://newrepublic.com/article/157399/medias-coronavirus-coverage-exposes-ignorance-working-class

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-sheer-awe-inspiring-american-clusterfuck/
    https://www.ianwelsh.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Overdose-rates-US-from-CDC-768x479.png
    https://www.ianwelsh.net/america-a-failing-state/
    Jacobs analyses more deeply than that comment suggests, including both a broader overview of what's wrong and a deeper description of its roots ("wiki: She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost") One can read it in preparation for more immediately topical takes - such as Lewis's quicker and more narrow but prescient and perfectly timed book "The Fifth Risk".
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46266188-the-fifth-risk

    The foreigners who approve of Trump do so in approval (not complete denial)of the damage he is and will be doing to the US. They do not, apparently, see much risk to themselves in the guy - they seem unwary and oddly innocent of concern in this stage of the fascist takeover of the US, apparently presuming that they've seen the worst (in Iraq) and the disintegration of what launched the Iraq War can only improve things.

    And so we see near-universal public support of the media fog now being cast (by the usual suspects: wealthy corporate ownership, if you needed to ask) over the origins and natures of the incompetencies and the corruptions of various US governments, especially the Federal. Names are not being named (except in lies), fingers go unpointed (at the guilty), accurate blame is not part of the game (blaming lies are common, from those permitted to lie by established custom), "bothsides" are always the guilty parties, etc.

    The only obstacle it faces, this amnesiac fog, is the memory of those who have been watching. And that memory is at risk, under attack: Repetition of falsehood erodes it, silence erodes it, bribed modification erodes it; simply bearing accurate witness to the relevant physical past is now a political act of some risk and sacrifice in all news arenas, as if the entire country were the combat zone of a mistaken and poorly prosecuted war. Even the weather.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    This came out in 2007 - while W was still in office, but after the key re-election that allowed Republican media management to undermine its impact:

    It illustrates the turn on W that occurred late in his second term.

    The question now is whether the more rapidly and domestically disastrous Republican administration and Senate can similarly dodge the incoming verdict - the one that made W the least popular US President in the history of the country, a couple of years too late.

    Trump is moving faster than Reagan or W - his domestic disaster is hitting before, not after, the key re-election. His news management task is growing, and at a time of possible vulnerability.
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    This is how fascist governments in Europe and South America acquired the reputation of superior efficiency and more competent management of the public's business: They lied about the facts - repetitively, loudly, persistently, and without apology, in the public record. Neither Mussolini or Hitler oversaw the slightest improvement in the performance of their respective railroad systems, for example - instead, they oversaw years of nation-wide falsification of the records by everyone who wanted to keep their jobs.

    And so the pattern we see in the governance of the US, everywhere a Republican (fascist) administration has taken power, is a familiar one. The State of Georgia provides an apposite illustration for today (taxes, economic performance, climate change, Clinton's emails, Trump's venality and treason, racial abuse by police, et al, relegated to the liars's back burner for the time being)
    https://www.ajc.com/news/state--reg...uses-critics-cry-foul/182PpUvUX9XEF8vO11NVGO/
    Note that it wasn't exactly an error in the sense of being a mistake or accident - the graph was set up like that intentionally, on purpose, by professionals whose declared motive was to be "helpful".

    And it was helpful - to the government that hired them.

    Meanwhile: The falsehoods promulgated by the State government of Georgia in its intentionally misleading presentations of the Covid data have already spread into the Wall Street Journal, the casual commentary of the major media, and the assertions of the Federal government's responsible officials.

    In a few more years of Republican (fascist) government it may be impossible for an ordinary citizen to recover an accurate record of the events of the past few months. It is already becoming difficult. https://www.ajc.com/news/state--reg...r-shifting-virus-data/k9oUbZDE3z6iyouWQBF7gJ/
     
    Last edited: May 21, 2020
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    A usefully direct observation of a key fact about the information struggles currently blighting US politics and societal response:
    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free

    Note that this undercuts one of my more frequently posted claims on this forum - that there is no excuse for the blockheaded level of ignorance displayed by the white American wingnut here or anywhere, their inability to acknowledge even the most obvious and unavoidable of physical facts if in conflict with the corporate media feed and framing that has become their reality. There is some excuse - reason and evidence (being expensive and requiring work to compile) is paywalled and inconvenient, bs is more easily generated by minions, better financed by self-interested rich people, and more frequently encountered by the casual peruser.

    But notice as well that this undercutting came from the left - none of the Tribe here has responded to my often repeated criticism of the slip-shod "conservative" mode of post by citing this factor.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    A vital step in the program of historical revision and concealment, the composing of a paste-over narrative, is currently being undertaken.

    The problem being addressed:
    Part 1) The Republican Party of today is an obvious and direct descendant of the Republican Party that nominated and elected Ronald Reagan to the Presidency of the entire country.
    Part 2) The Republican Party of today has obviously and directly nominated and elected Donald Trump to the Presidency of the entire country.

    The Republican Party's media wing has put a lot of time and effort into rewriting the history of the Reagan presidency so as to conceal the nature of it - that investment is now at risk: the Trump Republican presidency in mid-collapse bears far too close a resemblance and connection with Reagan's Republican presidency to allow the comparison to pass unchallenged; the mere attempt at comparison is dangerous to the Republican Party and the reputations of everyone associated with it.

    An accurate and well-considered comparison of Trump with Reagan, a tracing of their common emergence and support from the great body of Republican policyvoters, could put the entire Revised Standard Republican History of the United States at

    So we have been getting this kind of noise - with increasing volume and repetition and stridency: from https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2020/08/lifeboats-as-far-as-eye-can-see.html
    To which the obvious reactions include:
    1) nothing happened to Joe Scarborough's Republican Party. It hasn't changed significantly since Reagan's tenure.
    2) Joe Scarborough has been one of the significant figures in that Party and its vital media operations for a long time; he is personally accountable, in part, his share, for what that Party has been and done over the last two or three decades and what it is doing now.
    3) Stand-up guys don't weasel like that.

    Meanwhile, in the fringes where respectable media never go:
    https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-awjm4wLg...S23ETACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/GetYourElectionOn6.jpg
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2020
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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  13. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    You are the only one who has posted in this thread for the last year. It must get lonely in here. I just thought I'd come in and cheer you up.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    https://gizmodo.com/steve-bannon-caught-running-a-network-of-misinformation-1845633004
    At one point during the 2016 campaign my security software guys estimated that 4/5 of the political "information" being seen by the average Republican voter had been sent to them by a Russian farm troll.
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2020
  15. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    From the blogs:
    The "bothsides" frame, in action. It breeds a contempt from which few recover in time.

    Machiavelli knew - and recommended - better than that. The Prince was to avoid, if at all possible, becoming despised.

    To be sure of the point: The framing of the major media "respectable" news delivery is - as predicted by the lefty blogs - the Republican Party's media feed's framing.

    There is no leftwing news source among the respectable array. As US science, in particular, increasingly depends on (to the point of defining, in recent cases) leftwing reporting and analysis (the only political faction still maintaining allegiance to physical reality), its decreasingly significant access to the major or respectable news delivery venues increasingly isolates it from those Americans lacking a liberal humanist education in the first place. This threatens to take its role as part of the substance of such an education to a vanishing point.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Yeats's poem "The Second Coming".

    And by apparent coincidence - since there is another explanation and no one seems to be making a big deal out of the anniversary - the public discussion is full of quotes from that poem. This led to a scholar running back through the years and establishing that yes, during bad political times and societal disasters English speaking people tend to quote Yeats more frequently - especially that poem.
    https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/us...l&date=112120&utm_campaign=nl22162680&list=CP

    https://cf.geekdo-images.com/camo/f...164776173746174756546696c6530303638622e6a7067

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Tracking the Overton Window: https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/11/overton-window-watch-election-was.html
     
  19. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It lives.

    The media problem the left has been banging on about for the last seven Presidents and every campaign since 1980: https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-bold-declaratives-giveth-and-and.html

    That is what rightwing authoritarian corporate dominance of the US media looks like - how else could all those guys get jobs as parrots of bullshit, and every single media pundit crew with a large mainstream audience not only pay them handsomely but devote a majority of its air time to shoring up their framing of events?

    (Anyone who genuinely considers, gives credence to, for five seconds accepts as even remotely or possibly accurate, the hypothesis that the Republican Party has changed in any significant way since the year 2015 - just shut up and sit down, ok? The adults have work to do.)
     
    Last edited: Dec 12, 2020
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The news of the news, the indications of how US news media will handle the aftermath of the recent elections - is regrettably not so good.

    The Republican media feed is again succeeding in separating its chosen leadership, actions, crimes, corruption, and major screwups, from the Party. This is done via rightwing corporate funded propaganda campaigns, focused on repeating memes and particular vocabulary as loudly and frequently and ubiquitously as possible in all major media. The horrorshow of the last few months of Republican governance, maybe three years or so in cases of imperfect amnesia, is never to be "Republican", but rather "Trumpism".

    This is enforced as before - as in the aftermath of W&C, and even Reagan/Bush (check out the contemporary media handling of the US economic skid under Reaganomics, even before the Party got its media feet under it) - by

    1) establishing the "bothsides" meme as the Demside boundary of the Overton Window framing all discussions of Partisan politics (for example: the word "Republican" is to appear only in analyses and discussions centered on the Republican view of an assumed "both sides" reality. The other "side", then, is the Democratic Party described as a mirroring but more extreme, boundary, bloc. The Party designation "Republican" is not to appear alone, regardless of the events or situations being punditized, and always to be in the center of the Overton Window, or maybe a bit "left".)

    2) setting up two Republican fronts in the media discussions, namely "Trump" and "Republican", each of which disowns the other, each of which (separately) occupies more bandwidth than the entire collection of centrist and left and liberal and sane libertarian viewpoints together. (That's how the Overton Window is moved).

    Evidence, and motive for this post: The cover headline on the January '21 issue of the magazine "In These Times" - the sound byte, metaphorically - reads:

    "Are Trump Voters A Lost Cause?"

    The first of the "Dispatches" inside this magazine - the category name for reports on situations or events, generally "respectable" and largely descriptive journalism - carries the title "MAGA March Toward Oblivion".

    The word "Republican" does not appear in the table of contents.

    "In These Times" is solidly left, on a left/right scale, and only somewhat authoritarian: to the extent that its vocabulary and framing reflect Republican propaganda pressures and tactics, those pressures and tactics have succeeded in framing almost the entire spectrum of US news and analysis.
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The mainstream news has been for at least forty years - one entire political generation - thoroughly corrupted by its corporate rightwing ownership; top to bottom.

    The propaganda campaign currently in full swing, financed and launched and enforced on their minions, is to separate the public image of the Republican Party - all of it, including its entire voting base in all visible categories, visible organizational support, and fifty year consistent record of corporate complicity as well as instigation -

    from its political reality as made clearly manifest in the character and rhetoric - embodied - in the one individual heroic person of Donald Trump.

    Evidence (mostly via https://driftglass.blogspot.com ): these quotes are from mainstream US media feeds over the past week, mostly from people hired and paid by wealthy Republicans, Trump's administration, and/or mainstream media corporations - and a line or two of self-employed or unemployed blogger (or poster here) response in contrasting typography:
    Cannot link through, for some reason. The Video is of John Bolton calling out other people - not repenting, not regretting, not in any way alluding to his own decades of labor in the Republican monster factory and close advisory employment by Trump himself, but entirely blaming other people - for abetting Trump.

    - - -
    Note that "The Hill", which advertises itself as a source of news and unbiased information, is already down-playing the event - claiming that the "situation" (not an organized assault on the Capitol building, a "situation") in some mysterious way "spiraled out of control" (whose control was it under? Then Republican officials and Congressmen and law enforcement guys closely associated with it? The President who met with and allied himself with its various leading voices? crickets) and did vandalism of stuff (the dead people not worthy of mention - or maybe that was a part that remained under control and according to plan?)
    - - -

    "How did this happen" asks lifelong Washington connected Republican, three year head of Trump administration Office of Management and Budget, several month Trump administration Director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, year long Trump administration Presidential chief of staff, and recently appointed Special Envoy to Northern Ireland (center of recently emerging legal attention to major Trump financial investments connected to Russian money laundering and government international hacking operations), Mick Mulvaney - but of course we are told that "all of that went away yesterday".
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/heres-...-the-capitol-11610061311?mod=livecoverage_web

    She noticed the effect of Trump's rhetoric only this week, with less than two weeks remaining in his tenure - meanwhile, upon appointment the head of a Republican administration's DOE had never set foot in a public school, after four years of setting Federal Education policy doesn't know what an inflection point is, and manages to resign in reaction to having to "clean up the mess" caused in part by poor education without mentioning - in the WSJ quotes - the dead, severely injured, and threatened in their lives.

    The mainstream media coverage has been so distracted by the vandalism one is led to wonder if that was the purpose of the vandalism, at least the photogenic incidents of it.

     
    Last edited: Jan 12, 2021
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Not sure where to put this - as my focus is on the media handling of these kinds of issues, rather than the medical response, I'll drop it here for the moment:

    https://www.virology.ws/2021/01/05/musings-of-an-anonymous-pissed-off-virologist/
    What follows would suffice as a simple and entirely accurate account of the US Federal government's executive branch response to the pandemic -

    a type of description and account (simple and accurate) that has not, even now, appeared in the mainstream US news media.
     

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