There are many things that get me angry from a political point of view. But this business with Trump is nothing short of insanity. And I don't understand why every interview with every a Trump supporter doesn't begin with the questions: "How do you justify supporting a man who promotes the use of torture even beyond waterboarding? Isn't this how we once defined evil not that long ago? And how do you justify the mass murder of innocent people, including children? Trump has called for the murder of the families of terrorists. How do you justify the support of a man who promotes the use of war crimes? I expect the tea-party media to ignore issues like torture and mass murder. But the "liberal media" should be all over this like vultures on a rotting carcass.
What makes me most angry is the tendency of media to keep presenting a "Gee, how could this happen?" facade, when they, in fact, have access to all the background information: the history of the Republican party that we've all seen devolve over the lat 15 years, the sociological and psychological data, the economic trends - everything we need to understand exactly what's going on. And they're withholding it, because gee-wiz and lookee-that! make better tv. What else makes me very nearly as angry is the failure of all media that I'm aware of to ask the simplest, most obvious questions: who, what, where, why, when, how, how much, how many?
I rarely get angry. How is that helpful? I do agree with Jeeves above that it is annoying, disappointing, etc. that the press is so lame today. They are more like PR people rather than journalists.
On this count, I would note two points: (1) Depends on what you call "liberal media". Maddow (msnbc) is certainly in (see point 2 below); Salon, AlterNet, and others, to be certain―the liberal web has nearly melted trying to keep up (see point 2 below). The newspapers usually denounced as part of the "liberal media conspiracy" for not sufficiently tanking the news rightward haven't been quite as loud, but they also have more constrictions on reportage versus editorial content (see point 2 below). (2) Overload. Maddow, for instance, does between three and five stories a night, five nights a week; Trump dispenses at least that many offenses each day. It's impossible for a news and commentary outlet constrained by column inches or broadcast time to cover both this and anything else. I might add a subset and point out that many liberal writers threw in with Bernie Sanders, and have spent much time and effort pursuing Hillary Clinton. Not that I specifically begrudge them this; it's just something to account for. Most of them could spare a column here and there, though, for Trump. There is, actually, a political tactic that this looks more than a bit like. Consider a debate, the idea of two minutes to answer, and how many times you sit there agonizing, wondering what the candidate is doing, and how anyone could possibly screw the answer that badly. Much of the time, it is intentional. If you pack enough bullshit into your two minutes, then most of those talking points will survive to see another day. That is, if you can pack enough bullshit into your two meinutes, then your opponent simply cannot cover it all in theirs. Trump is having an effect that looks similar; it's just orders of magnitude beyoned anything we've seen. The most dangerous effect is normalization; average is as average does, a purely statistical result. If Trump becomes "one side of the argument" the way mass killings in the U.S. and, now, apparently, as we see abroad, butchering the French have become "just another day", what happens to the median point? It's a powerful effect; I don't know quite what the solution is. To wit, maybe msnbc could grab five hosts―Mitchell, Matthews, Hayes, Maddow, O'Donnell―and have each give an entire show one day a week to the sins of Donald Trump. Artistically―and let's face it, electioneering is art―there are myriad risks about it. Americans got caught flat-footed; the idea that the currents are there is easy enough, but the proposition that this is actually happening seems to be a bit tougher. Nobody can quite figure what will, at the very least, fail to make things worse.
That's pretty much what they've been doing, only not limited to just one show a week. Speaking of becoming angry: The overwhelming devotion of the US media to news of Trump, for a year or more now, has led my housemate to simply quit watching TV News. She took to referring to the news analysis on CNN and MSNBC as the Trump Report, and refused to give money to Public Broadcasting this year because they spent so much time on Trump. Some writers maybe - of little or no audience, particularly. Not the major media, or journalists engaged in "coverage" with mainstream access or bylines. In the mainstream it was Trump by far, then Clinton, then in a distant and fuzzy image sometimes Sanders but more likely Rubio or Cruz or Kasich or the like. Sanders, notably in particular, had a hard time getting air time throughout, until Clinton had de facto clinched - and even then he was 1) only covered as linked with Trump - symptoms of voter dissatisfaction with the establishment, loose cannons liable to damage their Party, etc -, or 2) covered regarding his relationship with Clinton's victory, whether and when he would endorse, what his effect would be on Clinton's campaign, etc. To this day he lacks name recognition among black voters in the Confederacy (the demographic centrally responsible for nominating Clinton). And this too was angering in its transparency. Which is an indictment of US journalism, and a sign of the Apocalypse. Because this has been old news since 1980. Because there has been no slower or louder or more obvious incoming train wreck than the emergence of the Donald. Because that's like getting caught flatfooted by snow in the winter. Because nobody in the circle of bloggers and intellectuals and so forth I rely on got caught flatfooted - this entire Trump thing has been one "what did you expect?" moment after another. And because these powerful, wealthy, job-secure media professionals still haven't realized they got caught. We're still seeing soberfaced punditry speculating as to what led to the sudden emergence of this new phenomenon, the angry Trump voter who seems unreachable by facts and reasoning. As if they'd never seen anything like it. As if the word "dittohead" had never crossed their shocked, shocked, punditry devoted little minds.
Note that I'm not talking about holding Trump accountable. Plenty of people are skewing Trump even though there are not enough direct questions to Trump about torture and murder. I am talking about holding the people who support him responsible - the Republican leadership - and make them answer for their support of a man whose stated intention is to use torture and the mass murder of innocent people. My Ryan, as a Christian, how can you not object feverishly to the election of anyone who desires to commit war crimes? Is this a situation where politics Trumps Jesus? How do you justify this to your children. Does the bad handling of emails rise to the level of murder and torture?
Haha, yes, I get angry but everyone who ever crossed me in a bad way eventually regretted it. I'm not a devious person by nature but can be when cornered. There was a guy who screwed me badly some years ago. It ended up costing him his career. And the best part was that I only needed to hand him the rope with a smile and he hung himself.
The basic reason is that they are poor questions and/or have easy and pointless answers: You're vastly misunderstanding how the American populace thinks on torture: only 25% of Americans disagree with using torture in all circumstances. We could have an entire thread on how/why, but suffice to say, the answer to your "I don't understand why..." is that you apparently didn't know that the position is mainstream/non-controversial. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/senate-torture-report-public-opinion/ That would be an odd follow-up question, but the simple answer would be: "No, I've never heard that." I'm going to assume that's all one. For a reporter, that would be a cumbersome mess, so that would be an easy answer as to why they don't ask it. That said, the easy answer would be: "He retracted it, so that is a pointless question." More broadly, though, we live in a world where the Geneva Conventions have become obsolete, where most of the armed conflict in the world today was started by entities not party to the Geneva Conventions. I would be interested in hearing his comments on torture if you have references for them, but the media was most certainly all over his comments on bombing civilians....including his retraction.
Oh, it's controversial. A lot of Americans are even a bit - how should we put it - "perturbed" that their notions of what kind of a country would be good to live in, in the respect of one that has/does not have a network of torture prisons for bad people, are not shared by their neighbors. You are correct that a quite large proportion of Americans think that torture is just fine by them, of course used against their enemies and horrible criminals only - (it will be restricted to bad people who want to hurt us by the omniscience and good will of their government, as personified by Donald Trump). These Americans are of course willing to subvert their Constitution (which currently forbids cruelty, demands habeas corpus, etc) and lose the support of the decent civilizations of the world while motivating their enemies to greater efforts (Abu Ghraib, etc) because that's how they roll. The Geneva Conventions have become obsolete? Yep, that sounds like Trump. So that is how significant groups in the US join the ranks of the "entities" not party to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Geneva_Conventions So it's OK by mainstream Americans if other Americans are treated by their captors as representatives of some "entity" that is not party to the Geneva Conventions - as British citizens were treated in Gitmo, say, or Iraqi, Iranian, Yemeni, and Egyptian citizens in various US black site prisons world wide. The fraction of Americans who regard their never having heard of something as evidence that it does not exist is also very large - and overlaps significantly with the fraction that approves of having their government torture people their government has told them are bad people. Neat trick for a politician. Maybe Clinton hasn't heard of it - somebody should tell her that all she has to do is say she retracts something, and all journalists will understand that asking her more questions about it is "pointless".
That doesn't surprise me at all. There is a reason why torture is a war crime. Look it up sometime. And you claim that a man who would commit mass murder, but takes it back, is okay. Why am I not surprised.
