One day, I hope to live in a country where presidential debates are held on public television and organized by subject because we need to hear the issues.
Watch the movie Social Dilemma on Netflix since you're in your twenties. You'll see how platforms like Facebook are working to manipulate how you think. To get us to move away from the soundbite culture will require some serious choices. One is to assume that important information about what is going on is not on FB. It's fine for cute cat videos but other than that, it's a tool of destruction to our democracy.
My daughter and I have had this discussion many times. I realize that social media has become a force but Republicans have been manipulating the public as well as the mainstream media for decades. Propaganda, media intimidation, smears and lies have been carefully crafted by guys like Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Frank Luntz and infected the public via outlets like Fox New, right wing talk radio, and mainstream “liberal” media that buys into their propaganda. Social media wasn’t responsible for the damaging email pseudo scandal, the mainstream media drove those stories. The bogus accusations against the Clinton Foundation came from Steve Bannon’s right hand man Peter Schweitzer from his book “Clinton Cash”. The NY Times actually signed an exclusive agreement with Schweitzer so they could print excerpts from his propaganda. His claims were easily debunked but the fact that the Times had legitimized the lies and innuendo made them very damaging.
Social media has amplified what the right wing machine has created but they didn’t start the disinformation.
This article about research done by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center breaks down how misinformation is spread. They concluded:
“Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role. “
I totally agree. The erosion of our institutions began during the Reagan administration, perhaps even earlier following Watergate. However, that doesn't excuse the power of Facebook and what it is doing to further erode our democracy. Certainly the Russians have exploited this new avenue to divide our country. I find it alarming that today, most of my Republican Trump loving friends get their news from FB.
OMG! My daughter texted a few minutes ago that my Trump cult sister-in-law put up a post urging everyone to watch Social Dilemma. It opened her eyes to how Facebook and other social media have been manipulated people. Some of her friends recommended it to her so I would guess they could see she was going off the rails — far off the rails. She had always been a very nice, reasonable person but lately she has been posting about things like Hillary and Huma Abedin running a child kidnapping ring and other Q Anon insanity. It has been heartbreaking to watch. (Very much like the documentary about how Fox News brainwashed a woman’s dad.) Maybe she is starting to see the light of sanity. The really sad part has been that her only daughter works for the Democratic Party.
Steve Bannon has been a major force manipulating both the mainstream media and social media into manipulating us.
I was a member when they stopped hosting the debates. They didn’t want to have anything to do with them because the process had become so politicized. The candidates reps were fighting every detail. There is no way the League would go back to hosting debates.
Better yet they should do townhall formats, one candidate at a time and one subject at a time, so that each candidate has plenty of time to answer the questions. The combative debate format is like anything a president actually does. Biden isn’t going to spend his presidency debating Mitch McConnell; the negotiating that will be done is very different from a public debate. Nor does being able to deliver a clever “gotcha” quip — something the media salivates over — have anything to do with governing. Reagan making a joke about his age convinced journalists that he didn’t have cognitive issues going into his second term. In fact he got so bad his own staff considered invoking the 25th amendment.
Rachel Maddow did a presidential forum for Democratic primary candidates in SC in 2015. I learned a lot about each candidate and what they were proposing from that one program than from anything else I saw during that election.
Unfortunately candidates know that the media really hates to cover issues in any depth, projecting their attitude onto voters. After a Clinton State of the Union speech the network anchors slammed it for being a “laundry list”, too focused on many “small bore” policy proposals. They proclaimed it was too long and that the public was bored by it — until the overnight polls came in showing that public not only liked it but also the audience increased as the speech went on. Silly me, I thought that embarrassment would make the media change their tune. Nope! When Gore ran against Bush he was excoriated for being so focused on serious issues he put people to sleep (David Broder), not schmoozing reporter and giving them stupid nicknames the way Bush did (Frank Bruni), being too focused on the environment (Maureen Dowd).....
I'm reminded that Walter Cronkite said the final words he really wanted to say on his newscasts were not, "And that's the way it is," but instead, "We just gave you 22 minutes of headlines. Read your morning newspaper to find out a lot more." The network was not amused. How far we have declined.
Yeah, funny how much more urgently and passionately people respond to substance over a PR gimmicks clown show, which is all Republicans have. It was never about the people’s short attention span and need to be entertained, and always about the media’s decision to treat us like shallow idiots who want entertainment over substance. Now the American people know Democrats are the party of substance and action, and so does the media. We just have to win the Senate to accomplish any of it.
I’m just so freaking happy Joe Biden won, and we have the first woman Vice President, and hopefully woman President in the next cycle. Please, sweet baby Jesus, let us win the Senate in January.
I still don't give the media a good grade just because of the way this was handled. I'm happy things turned out the way they did with Biden/Harris. But for the last 4 years the written word and TV and S.M. have done the country an injustice. It will take more than this to make Americans believe in them again. I subscribe to your newsletter because of truth in your written word.
And now the media are giving misleading impressions of Biden’s win, downplaying just how big it really was. (They also missed just how big Democrats won in 2018 because it took awhile to get final results).
E.J. Dionne makes it clear that by rushing to proclaim the meaning of the results before all ballots are counted, many in the media are going with the false narrative that Biden’s win wasn’t that big of a deal:
“Myths often grow out of mistaken first impressions. So it needs to be asserted unequivocally that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is far more substantial than the conventional take would have it and more revelatory about the future than Donald Trump’s election was four years ago.”
In fact Trump’s loss was huge by modern standards. I have seen journalists make conclusions about the vote based solely on exit polls rather than waiting to see the breakdown of mail-in votes. The WaPo even had a headline proclaiming that this wasn’t a repudiation of Trump which it clearly was. The fact that a lot of Republicans voted against Trump but then voted for down ballot Republicans makes that clear. This was a rejection of Trump but, sadly, not Republicanism. It is also wrong for the media to keep saying Trumpism isn’t gone — as if the lunacy is the result of Trump, not of decades of Republican not decades of Republican extremism and slanders of Democrats.
I agree with you the lunacy is the republican party not just Trump. They have been on this road for a long time, 45 just showed it for it's true colors. Racism and greed.
I am glad to hear that the network news broadcasts focused more on policy but I bet not one of them ever accurately explained the healthcare debate. Since 2016 the media has given the impression that the only way other developed nations have reached universal, quality, affordable health care has been by adopting single payer systems. Many people believe that the moderate Democratic candidates who didn’t support single payer also didn’t support universal coverage, falsely believing that single payer is the only way to achieve that. I never heard any discussion about the fact that several countries with excellent universal care rely mainly on private insurance. Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Japan all use a multiple private payer approach and they all have highly rated universal healthcare. I am not sure why the moderates didn’t make their case, but that doesn’t excuse the media for allowing voters to be so badly misinformed on this critical issue. I would bet most journalists have never bothered to get the facts on this critical issue. I love Ali Velshi but he has repeatedly made the false claim that all other advanced countries are single payer.
As a result Democratic Party has been divided over a false impression that moderates oppose universal coverage. What should have been a discussion over the best means to get to that shared goal has been an acrimonious debate based on a false impression. When Bernie said he would get rid of all private health insurance no one in the media that I saw pointed out that no country has done that. Canadians routinely buy private supplemental health insurance as do many, if not most, US Medicare recipients. My nephew enrolled in the NHS when he lived in England but he also bought supplemental insurance.
I have asked many people I know who pay attention to politics what they think other countries use for health care and all of them said single payer/Medicare. When voters are so misinformed on such an important issue the media has failed badly.
We had friends visit us back in the 80s while we were stationed in Germany. During one of their castle outings, she slipped, fell, and broke her wrist. They were sorely disappointed to discover that their "anywhere you go" health insurance didn't cross the ocean, even with the travel rider. So they had to pay the total cost for the examination, the X-ray, setting the fracture, and the cast, which came to about $300. They were absolutely amazed, because the hospital also said it was okay if they couldn't pay it now, just pay it before they left to go home.
With all of the grumbling we usually do here about media news coverage, it feels good to have some good news on that front. The pressure of living with Trump is being slowly released in us.
That is good news and their continued debunking of Trump's ridiculous attempt to claim he's won and to take it to the courts is also good news. There is no rest for the weary as Trump will continue to be a toddler through the transition process. How Trump's base can't understand that Trump's behavior is threatening the security of this nation speaks volumes about their ability to fully grasp what's going on. Hopefully the media will continue to cover this process appropriately and hopefully Fox News will join in. Fox has actually have been more responsible than I would have imagined. I know, too little too late but it's still be a welcome change.
Hi there. I don't want to hi-jack your thread but don't know how else to contact you. I cannot subscribe but would like to make a one-time donation to PressRun. Is there a way to do that? Thanks for your reporting. I have so enjoyed it.
One day, I hope to live in a country where presidential debates are held on public television and organized by subject because we need to hear the issues.
Soundbite culture is terrible for democracy.
give the debates back to League of Women Voters!
Is that how it use to be? That’s amazing! (I’m in my twenties so I had no idea).
Watch the movie Social Dilemma on Netflix since you're in your twenties. You'll see how platforms like Facebook are working to manipulate how you think. To get us to move away from the soundbite culture will require some serious choices. One is to assume that important information about what is going on is not on FB. It's fine for cute cat videos but other than that, it's a tool of destruction to our democracy.
My daughter and I have had this discussion many times. I realize that social media has become a force but Republicans have been manipulating the public as well as the mainstream media for decades. Propaganda, media intimidation, smears and lies have been carefully crafted by guys like Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Frank Luntz and infected the public via outlets like Fox New, right wing talk radio, and mainstream “liberal” media that buys into their propaganda. Social media wasn’t responsible for the damaging email pseudo scandal, the mainstream media drove those stories. The bogus accusations against the Clinton Foundation came from Steve Bannon’s right hand man Peter Schweitzer from his book “Clinton Cash”. The NY Times actually signed an exclusive agreement with Schweitzer so they could print excerpts from his propaganda. His claims were easily debunked but the fact that the Times had legitimized the lies and innuendo made them very damaging.
Social media has amplified what the right wing machine has created but they didn’t start the disinformation.
This article about research done by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center breaks down how misinformation is spread. They concluded:
“Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role. “
https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fraud-Disinformation-2020
I totally agree. The erosion of our institutions began during the Reagan administration, perhaps even earlier following Watergate. However, that doesn't excuse the power of Facebook and what it is doing to further erode our democracy. Certainly the Russians have exploited this new avenue to divide our country. I find it alarming that today, most of my Republican Trump loving friends get their news from FB.
OMG! My daughter texted a few minutes ago that my Trump cult sister-in-law put up a post urging everyone to watch Social Dilemma. It opened her eyes to how Facebook and other social media have been manipulated people. Some of her friends recommended it to her so I would guess they could see she was going off the rails — far off the rails. She had always been a very nice, reasonable person but lately she has been posting about things like Hillary and Huma Abedin running a child kidnapping ring and other Q Anon insanity. It has been heartbreaking to watch. (Very much like the documentary about how Fox News brainwashed a woman’s dad.) Maybe she is starting to see the light of sanity. The really sad part has been that her only daughter works for the Democratic Party.
Steve Bannon has been a major force manipulating both the mainstream media and social media into manipulating us.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/facebook-bannon-trump/
I was a member when they stopped hosting the debates. They didn’t want to have anything to do with them because the process had become so politicized. The candidates reps were fighting every detail. There is no way the League would go back to hosting debates.
This. Absolutely this all the way. ☝️
Better yet they should do townhall formats, one candidate at a time and one subject at a time, so that each candidate has plenty of time to answer the questions. The combative debate format is like anything a president actually does. Biden isn’t going to spend his presidency debating Mitch McConnell; the negotiating that will be done is very different from a public debate. Nor does being able to deliver a clever “gotcha” quip — something the media salivates over — have anything to do with governing. Reagan making a joke about his age convinced journalists that he didn’t have cognitive issues going into his second term. In fact he got so bad his own staff considered invoking the 25th amendment.
Rachel Maddow did a presidential forum for Democratic primary candidates in SC in 2015. I learned a lot about each candidate and what they were proposing from that one program than from anything else I saw during that election.
Unfortunately candidates know that the media really hates to cover issues in any depth, projecting their attitude onto voters. After a Clinton State of the Union speech the network anchors slammed it for being a “laundry list”, too focused on many “small bore” policy proposals. They proclaimed it was too long and that the public was bored by it — until the overnight polls came in showing that public not only liked it but also the audience increased as the speech went on. Silly me, I thought that embarrassment would make the media change their tune. Nope! When Gore ran against Bush he was excoriated for being so focused on serious issues he put people to sleep (David Broder), not schmoozing reporter and giving them stupid nicknames the way Bush did (Frank Bruni), being too focused on the environment (Maureen Dowd).....
I'm reminded that Walter Cronkite said the final words he really wanted to say on his newscasts were not, "And that's the way it is," but instead, "We just gave you 22 minutes of headlines. Read your morning newspaper to find out a lot more." The network was not amused. How far we have declined.
Can't do that any more. There's still a morning newspaper, but there's very little of national or international news in it.
Sad to say, yes.
Yeah, funny how much more urgently and passionately people respond to substance over a PR gimmicks clown show, which is all Republicans have. It was never about the people’s short attention span and need to be entertained, and always about the media’s decision to treat us like shallow idiots who want entertainment over substance. Now the American people know Democrats are the party of substance and action, and so does the media. We just have to win the Senate to accomplish any of it.
I’m just so freaking happy Joe Biden won, and we have the first woman Vice President, and hopefully woman President in the next cycle. Please, sweet baby Jesus, let us win the Senate in January.
Amen!
I still don't give the media a good grade just because of the way this was handled. I'm happy things turned out the way they did with Biden/Harris. But for the last 4 years the written word and TV and S.M. have done the country an injustice. It will take more than this to make Americans believe in them again. I subscribe to your newsletter because of truth in your written word.
And now the media are giving misleading impressions of Biden’s win, downplaying just how big it really was. (They also missed just how big Democrats won in 2018 because it took awhile to get final results).
E.J. Dionne makes it clear that by rushing to proclaim the meaning of the results before all ballots are counted, many in the media are going with the false narrative that Biden’s win wasn’t that big of a deal:
“Myths often grow out of mistaken first impressions. So it needs to be asserted unequivocally that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is far more substantial than the conventional take would have it and more revelatory about the future than Donald Trump’s election was four years ago.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-define-bidens-victory-down/2020/11/08/ea3dbe4e-207c-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html
In fact Trump’s loss was huge by modern standards. I have seen journalists make conclusions about the vote based solely on exit polls rather than waiting to see the breakdown of mail-in votes. The WaPo even had a headline proclaiming that this wasn’t a repudiation of Trump which it clearly was. The fact that a lot of Republicans voted against Trump but then voted for down ballot Republicans makes that clear. This was a rejection of Trump but, sadly, not Republicanism. It is also wrong for the media to keep saying Trumpism isn’t gone — as if the lunacy is the result of Trump, not of decades of Republican not decades of Republican extremism and slanders of Democrats.
I agree with you the lunacy is the republican party not just Trump. They have been on this road for a long time, 45 just showed it for it's true colors. Racism and greed.
I am glad to hear that the network news broadcasts focused more on policy but I bet not one of them ever accurately explained the healthcare debate. Since 2016 the media has given the impression that the only way other developed nations have reached universal, quality, affordable health care has been by adopting single payer systems. Many people believe that the moderate Democratic candidates who didn’t support single payer also didn’t support universal coverage, falsely believing that single payer is the only way to achieve that. I never heard any discussion about the fact that several countries with excellent universal care rely mainly on private insurance. Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Japan all use a multiple private payer approach and they all have highly rated universal healthcare. I am not sure why the moderates didn’t make their case, but that doesn’t excuse the media for allowing voters to be so badly misinformed on this critical issue. I would bet most journalists have never bothered to get the facts on this critical issue. I love Ali Velshi but he has repeatedly made the false claim that all other advanced countries are single payer.
As a result Democratic Party has been divided over a false impression that moderates oppose universal coverage. What should have been a discussion over the best means to get to that shared goal has been an acrimonious debate based on a false impression. When Bernie said he would get rid of all private health insurance no one in the media that I saw pointed out that no country has done that. Canadians routinely buy private supplemental health insurance as do many, if not most, US Medicare recipients. My nephew enrolled in the NHS when he lived in England but he also bought supplemental insurance.
I have asked many people I know who pay attention to politics what they think other countries use for health care and all of them said single payer/Medicare. When voters are so misinformed on such an important issue the media has failed badly.
It is amazing how many Americans think out bizarre system of health care is the norm
We had friends visit us back in the 80s while we were stationed in Germany. During one of their castle outings, she slipped, fell, and broke her wrist. They were sorely disappointed to discover that their "anywhere you go" health insurance didn't cross the ocean, even with the travel rider. So they had to pay the total cost for the examination, the X-ray, setting the fracture, and the cast, which came to about $300. They were absolutely amazed, because the hospital also said it was okay if they couldn't pay it now, just pay it before they left to go home.
With all of the grumbling we usually do here about media news coverage, it feels good to have some good news on that front. The pressure of living with Trump is being slowly released in us.
Agreed! It felt good/weird writing up media praise;)
That is good news and their continued debunking of Trump's ridiculous attempt to claim he's won and to take it to the courts is also good news. There is no rest for the weary as Trump will continue to be a toddler through the transition process. How Trump's base can't understand that Trump's behavior is threatening the security of this nation speaks volumes about their ability to fully grasp what's going on. Hopefully the media will continue to cover this process appropriately and hopefully Fox News will join in. Fox has actually have been more responsible than I would have imagined. I know, too little too late but it's still be a welcome change.
Fox News this morning discussing whether votes were swapped from Trump to Biden via computer hacking.....
Ugh! I spoke too soon. Shame on me. :(
Hi there. I don't want to hi-jack your thread but don't know how else to contact you. I cannot subscribe but would like to make a one-time donation to PressRun. Is there a way to do that? Thanks for your reporting. I have so enjoyed it.
Hi Andrea! you can drop me a note at boehlerteric@gmail. thanks!
Thanks! And yes it’s helpful for me to be able express what I know lots of other folks are feeling .
My face is cracking with all the smiling.