Sadly, this is what America under Trump has come to. He has fomented hostility, anger and violence against the press, one of the first steps toward fascism. Turning the Press into the enemy has been an initial step throughout history toward authoritarianism.
What I want to know is, who is going to stand up and say, āenoughā? These cult followers are all open-carry, NRA gun-nuts and they are holding our fourth estate hostage - do as Trump says, say nothing bad about him, or we will kill you and not suffer any consequences because Dear Leader has said itās ok.
This is a dark period in our history. Very dark. It needs to have a bright light shone on it and be brought to a halt.
Words fail.
This just doesnāt happen in liberal democracies.
And yet -
The press corps STILL attends the daily briefing of lies and insults at the WH. They STILL report on the regimeās absurdities (some of them deadly) as if thereās some kind of method to their madness. They STILL refuse to sound alarm bells that the republic is under attack from within. (That would just be overblown, yannow?) Things were okay and kinda fun when the point was to savage SoS Clinton and make her a one term POTUS. To them, she was annoying and deserved to be held to the fire. Hunting season on a Clinton never stopped. Now the hunting season is on reporters who fomented that insanity. I donāt even have a tiny violin for this.
Sure is a good thing there are no right wing domestic terrorists.
I think thereās some truth to that if youāre talking about the NYT. I donāt know to what extent itās true of anyone else. My own opinion is the media generally did fail to contrast her serious, adult campaign with the Trump clown show. I donāt know if the newspaper or TV stations in, say, Knoxville, ever seriously talked about what you do about workers displaced in a postindustrial and automated society. She did, though, in realistic ways. Trump did, with childish fantasies. Iām pretty sure we never heard much about that.
But I know you know thereās been a lot of aggressive reporting and itās hurt Trump. I know you donāt really lack concern about this.
Weāve become a repressive regime. Thanks Trump.
So are you leaning toward the abused spouse defense? Continued beatings and denigrations, but they still love the abuser? I wouldnāt disagree, honestly. That the press allows this when they could fix this by accurately and thoroughly reporting, rather than acting as scribes in a strange attempt to appear unbiased, shows them to be a weak adversary. The press SHOULD be an adversary against the lies, but theyāre too frightened to do their jobs.
The right wing terroristsā plan to kill people is by no means limited to reporters.
Because, as someone in the media said, his campaign got great ratings. The dry, sane policy speeches by HRC were pre-empted by Trumpās rallies because the rallies were more fun.
There has. But this is an unprecedented attack on our countryās values. A lot of aggressive reporting is what you expect about Iran-Contra or Enron. I think what peope expect here is living up to the title of Fourth Estate.
This is 100% right. If you put a hidden mic on two right wing Trump loving traitors what you will hear is literal death threats for minorities, Democrats and all immigrants.
They want us dead pure and simple. These āpeopleā are a disease and they ought to be treated as such.
In the Press Freedom Index of Reporters sans frontiĆØres, the United State ranks one-quarter of the way down the list at 45. Just below Romania, but ahead of Belize, Botswana, and Senegal. Russia clocks in at 148 and China at 176. Dead last is North Korea at 180. No wonder Trump admires Kim Jong-Un so much.
I have some sympathy for your views, but donāt think there is anything pleasurable to be gained from the press being abused. We have to protect our American institutions from Trump. If we donāt we will all end up powerless subjects in the third world dystopia he envisions for America. .
I agree itās a national crisis. And yet the world wags on, day to day. So tell me how youād like the critical nature of the crisis to be conveyed that it isnāt right now? Sometimes it seems like people want every reporter to be screaming all day every day that this is a national crisis and an unprecedented attack on our values and way of life. Where do you put that into a piece on some wrangling over a farm bill? First graf? Fourth? Seventh? I see serious, vehement condemnations of the unprecedented attack in the opinion pieces for sure. Rick Wilson, David Frum, George Will, Jill Wine-Banks, they sit on TV and say āThis is worse than Watergate.ā You think the media are normalizing this? How about the people who voted for him? How about the party that enables him? Itās a crisis, but there he sits, every day, and people get used to it. Itās one of the most powerful impulses, accommodating yourself to a change over time. I just wish people would explain to me what exactly the media should do that theyāre not doing that would be viable or effective and make everyone here happy. Again, where does your knowledge that this is a crisis come from, exactly, if not from the media? I think people fail to understand that media people arenāt fucking dragon-slayers. Theyāre like scouts or spiesāthey go out and they say āThe kingdom on the other side of the river is building a great armada of warships.ā Their job is not then to build a navy and forts and mine the river around our own kingdom. Thatās our job. Oh, and by the way the press never dubbed itself the Fourth Estate, because it never had formal power. Still doesnāt. So I guess Iām going to continue to be a bit of an outlier on this subject but I just got done arguing with a poster who said only Mueller can fix this. Only we can fix this. Iāve already mentioned a few people who regularly point out that weāre in an unprecedented kind of trouble. There are many more. The damn people who still believe in our traditional way of life need to step up. Period. We know what Trump is. We knew before we voted for him. Enough bashing now. It grows unhelpful.
The US has become a banana republic with a monkey for a leaderā¦
Speaking as a Knoxvillian, neither our very conservative paper (now owned by Gannett and sort of a USA Today lite)nor our 3 major TV stations have done any such thing.
We get happy talk, conservative opinions, and lip service to democratic norms.
Because having the press at the White House for a press briefing only started in the second term of Cleveland. If the press stopped showing up then the WH would cancel the WH press briefing. It took awhile to get started why give Trump a chance to end it?
A shit-ton less both-siderism. Thatās what Iād like. Other than that I agree with you.