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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    A small crack in the media coverage of a bothsider: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-to-make-525k-in-eight-weeks.html
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    A central factor, now coming into investigation:
    http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf
    " Previous academic work on bullshit has been limited and mostly theoretical. Black (1983) edited a collection of essays on “humbug”, the predecessor of bullshit, which he defines as “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings or attitudes” (Black, 1983: 23). Frankfurt (2005) is the first theoretical treatment of the concept of “bullshit” and he situates it in terms of previous philosophical traditions. A crucial aspect of bullshitting in Frankfurt’s work is the fact that bullshitters have no concern for the truth, which is different than a purposeful lie (Frankfurt, 2005: 54). Cohen responds to Frankfurt’s essay and focuses on a slightly different definition of bullshit where “the character of the process that produces bullshit is immaterial” (Cohen, 2002: 2) "

    And how is bullshit going to be covered by US media?
    Like this: https://www.vox.com/2019/4/29/18522...-media-coverage-revived-an-inaccurate-refrain
    "As Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star highlighted, the headlines major outlets used to describe Trump’s rally completely ignored his lies and incendiary smears. And it goes beyond headlines — in their articles about the rally, CBS, USA Today, the Associated Press, and the Hill failed to so much as mention that Trump pushed a number of false claims."
    - - -
    " The New York Times did attempt to fact-check Trump’s lie about Democrats and abortion— Trump accused Democrats of supporting doctors who “wrap the baby beautifully” before they get together with the mother and “determine whether or not they will execute the baby” — but in so doing, the outlet demonstrated it doesn’t really have a vocabulary to adequately deal with Trump.

    Instead of calling Trump’s lie a lie, the Times used the euphemism “revived an inaccurate refrain” in a tweet that was widely mocked. The accompanying article goes out of its way to avoid accusing Trump of lying, instead describing him as “reviv[ing] on Saturday night what is fast becoming a standard, and inaccurate, refrain about doctors ‘executing babies.’”
     
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  5. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    This is why I like C-Span at times. No filters. No spin. Just watch whatever is before you, and figure it out yourself.

    Do you trust movie critics or would you prefer to see the movie yourself? The media is very untrustworthy.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    In a change of pace from the day by day tracking, a remarkable and unexpected 16,000 word review of the media coverage of politics in the US since the fascist takeover of the Republican Party,

    by a blogger with an excellent track record of insight and forecasting,

    using as a touchstone one of those worthless, bubbledwelling, ignorant Republican pundits who have luxuriously paid and perked lifetime seats at the mass media money trough while supremely competent writers and journalists and photographers and editors and researchers and fact checkers and leftwing pundits are let go from barely middle class gigs for "budgetary reasons":

    http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-bonfire-of-sanities.html#more
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Some of the media are reliable, trustworthy, and competent.
    Send them money, pay attention to them.
    No context - so unless you already know a lot about what's going on, you can't "figure it out yourself".
    Journalist is not an easy job - amateurs can't really match professionals, the elite among the professionals stand out.
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2019
  9. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    i only watch movie critics that critique high intellectual value movies
    and only then if they are ones i feel a strong artistic affinity to.

    comedy, action, sci-fi, action-drama i wont seek or read movie reviews on.

    i dont like spoilers

    have you seen hidden figures ?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  10. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    what did the Republican party spend the Devos 200 Million dollar donations on ?

    while i recognise good business by leveraging the taxation system to get tax credit for over profit used as donations to avoid higher income tax brackets...

    i have a bit of an issue about such vast sums of money supposedly "required" to run a peoples democracy.

    if the society has gone soo far down the shit hole that you need to own all media to move some morally ignorant swing voters then has Democracy already lost ?
    who is left making power grabs ?

    for argument sake
    say a foreign national(private person) from china or russia donated 200 million to the democrat party...
    would that suddenly become illegal ?

    what difference would it make if the system is run democratically ?
    none i suggest
    unless it is a pay per vote autocracy
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Another central factor in media coverage of candidate Presidents:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/executive-power-doesnt-mean-much/590461/

    Not suddenly. That law is not a recent one. (Pub. L. 92–225, title III, §319, formerly §324, as added Pub. L. 94–283, title I, §112(2), May 11, 1976, 90 Stat. 493 ;
    http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:52 section:30121 edition

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    relim)
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The media coverage of pollution in the US has been increasingly framed by partisan Republican feeds - this has affected, dramatically (if you happen to be following) the coverage of poverty and crime and their associations with various environmental factors that have racial biases in the US.

    Lead poisoning is one of them. So we have Presidential candidates who are addressing that issue specifically (Julian Castro, say, visibly) and we can track how the media covers this aspect of the campaigns -

    which is on reality grounds outside the "identity politics" schtick, and is almost impossible to bothside credibly.

    Will the Republicans and the Republican Party get bad press and public criticism for their longstanding policies and political efforts surrounding the many and varied aspects of this kind of issue and finding, for example:
    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-d...vels-in-kids-reduces-crime-when-they-grow-up/

    Everything from get tough on crime and military vs infrastructure budgeting, to funding of the EPA and industry regulation, to judicial reform and gerrymandering, is involved here - and the Republican Party has been badly wrong (at best) about all of it.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Some numbers on the media coverage of the first D debate:
    https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/first-2020-democratic-debate-night-1/#id_15524
    https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2019/06/27/celebrity-journalists-are-bad/
     
  14. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    do the media own the power over the swing voters to win or lose the election for the partys running ?

    how many countries does the usa send humanitarian aid to that allows people to get out and vote in elections ?
    if they didnt prevent them from starving then they would not be able to vote, so is that meddling in elections ?

    normalized xenophobic language indoctrination ... "foriegn actor"
    how many illegal alien actors(foreign actors) are there in the usa ?
    wasn't Californians governator born somewhere else and an actor ?
    wasn't ronald regan an actor ?

    so actors are not allowed to voice their opinions about politics in the usa where free speech is not allowed ?

    Hamilton ?

    its a dirty business
    made so by those seeking to be king of the shit heap.

    why should the media be expected to be the moral bastions and protectors ?
    surely the media would be tax exempt if that were the case ... like church groups as they would provide a community service by informing and educating the people.
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2019
  15. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    If people wanted cleaner political processes, they would insist on separating entertainment media from information media - entertainment commercial; news and education, publicly funded NGO's.
    But most people don't give a flying
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Some long overdue major media attention to the bullshit factor - as differentiated from the outright dishonesty - in the Republican media feed (exemplified by Trump): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/on-trumps-bullshit/593062/

    Although the dishonesty factor remains unaddressed, in general, by the bulk of the news media - as seen in the coverage of these recent events: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...rationale-census-citizenship-question/593383/
     
  17. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    irony of the democratic run off is that to the uneducated it looks like the opposition do not have a normal center of policy

    how do you make 2 wrongs into a wright ?

    one is wrong, one is right
    one is wrong but was called right now that only 1 is left it must be right
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    On the topic, one assessment of the central problem - a malignant glitch that has been taking over "respectable" (professional, corporate, well paid) American news media since shortly after 1980 and is now a structural feature of all major US news media:
    http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/07/centrism-like-strontium-90-in-milk-ctd.html
    My own illustrative example remains that bizarre lecture fatuous functionary Brian Williams attempted to deliver to an actual journalist - Matt Taibbi - about Matt's failure to properly respect and grant credence to Trump's voting base during the 2016 campaign.

    Matt's defense was that he had just spent months riding buses and wearing out shoe leather interviewing Trump supporters and gathering facts in the field, and had established the fact that they were essentially, in their most important and significant and dominant political nature, ignorant, deeply racist, not too bright, and completely full of shit - that to respect them was to falsify them, and devalue the coin of respect in the first place.

    That was of course no defense at all from Williams's pov - getting such facts straight and reporting them was not a journalist's job, according to Williams. A journalist's job was to present - if necessary invent - two more or less equivalent sides to every political issue that looked bad for Republicans in the real world, argue them in turn on TV, and never tell your audience what to think about a Republican policy or person.

    Now there's no argument based on it, it's merely an example of a powerful and established US media figure deals with an actual journalist who has somehow, inconveniently, by mysterious means - probably by making bank selling books to actual individual readers without bribery and clandestine billionaire support - got a foot inside the door of the respectable media,

    to whit: Williams did not hire Taibbi, give him a staff for the secretarial work, pay him enough to dig into serious issues at length, and so forth, as someone of his demonstrated diligence and ability and experience had long earned - Williams instead tried to browbeat him into an admission of "bias" and a walkback of the hardwon discoveries from his months of dedicated work, while being kicked off the screen by a corporate suit with good hair who controls the fortunes of everyone he allows on TV and many others as well.

    Such was the liberal, left, "extremist" (Newt's assigned PC term), dominant US news feed for the entire campaign season of 2016.
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2019
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Another aspect of the 2020 campaign that is not getting "straight" coverage: the erosion and diminution and censorship of science and scientists in all agencies of the Federal government by the current Republican administration.

    Sometimes the scientists are replaced or supplanted or pushed aside by political representatives, sometimes they are not replaced at all and their former positions left unfilled. In one recent case, a bogus move of two entire department head offices from Washington DC (where they had been located to save money, since a large share of the top officials's jobs involved reporting field work to Congress and the Executive Branch) to some place in Kansas City (in either Kansas or Missouri, the location hadn't been chosen yet, although the move was given less than two month's notice and the scientists were expected to relocate themselves and their families), whereupon half of them quit - and that was the goal, celebrated by the Trump officials involved.

    A yet more recent example, then, of dozens: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/05/ziska-usda-climate-agriculture-trump-1445271
     
  20. Neddy Bate Valued Senior Member

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    2,548
    That's depressing. I wonder if it would help if the Democratic candidate brought that up, or if it would result the the tribe that rubs shit in their hair showing up to Trump rallies in white lab coats with toy microscopes. I'm sure they think its hilarious that they sabotage their own government in this way.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The media coverage of the Republican destruction of public scientific research and research based oversight of industry will be mediated - as they themselves label their role - by guys like this: https://mockpaperscissors.com/2019/08/19/the-pantheon-of-dunces-re-erects-mark-halperins-career/
    For those whose powers of remembrance have been rendered into soap by the "bothsides" Republican schtick, the hyperlink works:
    https://mockpaperscissors.com/2016/01/19/the-death-of-the-media-cont-22/
    Anyone who believes Mark Halperin is or ever has been a journalist, that he has ever asked a thought provoking question and then a follow-up question that had occurred to no one else - - - you're in luck:

    the line for an autographed copy of his new book will be much shorter and faster moving than the lines many black people endured to vote in Democratic districts of key cities in 2016 (in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, etc - e.g. https://billmoyers.com/story/city-c...-uw-green-bay-students-lean-toward-democrats/
    - whereupon tens of thousands of them cast no vote for President, apparently having waited in line for hours to vote for their city council, State rep, and local judges, while having no preference of President.)

    That circumstance, that report of US citizens standing in line for hours to vote in Democratic districts with lots of black or brown people, has become (over the years since 1980) so frequent and widespread as to be accepted as normal voting day news. It's almost as common as documented reports of voting machine "irregularities", mismatched exit poll findings, registration screwups that deny longtime voters a regular ballot and counted vote, and chain of custody breakdowns, in such districts.
    Reporting on such matters presented as evidence of widespread vote suppression (https://www.wpr.org/sites/default/files/20150529 - OWI - complaint.pdf) , fraudulent vote counting, and so forth, are apparently once again going to be labeled "one sided" attempts to "influence" people.
     
    Last edited: Aug 20, 2019
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Recent examples of the US "official liberal"news media feed include the output of the NYT stable of pundits.

    The NYT pays guys like Bret Stephens to cover - among other things - the US political response to scientific discoveries and issues of political moment. This is the kind of deep thinking and evaluation they pay for from what has become a working majority of their analysts and op ed "writers":
    http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/08/lord-save-us-from-pigheaded-confidence.html

    That is the kind of thinking about scientific campaign issues we will be getting from the supposed and firmly identified bastions of liberalism, lefty pov, etc. in the coming year.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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