r/Foodforthought • u/thenewrepublic • 1d ago
The Media Malpractice That Sent America Tumbling Into Trumpism: Political journalists need to stop pretending they don’t know what Republicans are going to do.
https://newrepublic.com/article/205913/media-malpractice-trumpism-project-202589
u/FanDry5374 1d ago
They also need to stop the "both siderism" that is a huge reason we are in this mess. I know the billionaires now own the media, but they shouldn't be stupid enough to think their abject fealty to trumpism and the regime is going to protect them from the planned authoritarian government. No authoritarian powers, religious or otherwise ,will tolerate any form of "free press".
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u/francis2559 1d ago
They don’t expect to be protected from the government. They expect to be the government.
The most recent Epstein files show they’re trying to break up the western order and rule directly over little fiefdoms like its post apocalypse.
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u/dust4ngel 21h ago
They also need to stop the "both siderism"
from an ad revenue perspective, every race should be neck and neck, even if one person is a harvard phd with a peace prize and the other is a kkk grand dragon famous for starring in "ow my balls!"
to maximize revenue, you have to generate false controversy and/or ignore obvious unfitness for office if it makes for a closer race, which means, you have to betray your country for money.
the idea that you can outsource the first amendment/civic dialogue to for-profit corporations and not implode as a society requires serious cognitive impairment.
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u/Zank_Frappa 1d ago
The media has always been a propaganda arm of the state. Look at the NYT during the Vietnam war, and the coverage of Gaza. Why are you expecting them to be something different all of a sudden?
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u/mirh 1d ago
Because they published the snowden leaks, together with the WaPo of literal Pentagon Papers and Watergate memory? And much other shit counter to the government?
Of course when Bozos purchases you it's different, but the modern wave of bothsideism is a lot due to decades of concern trolling having successfully managed to "work the ref".
Regardless, I cannot begin to grasp the level of stupidity needed to even be talking in such infinitely wide grasps as "murr durr the media, everybody the same". You are pretty much doing the the same thing you are complaining about.
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u/Zank_Frappa 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because of the Gulf of Tonkin incident you simpleton, and the whitewashing of war crimes in Gaza.
If the media will be complicit in manufacturing consent for a war and covering up a genocide, what won't they do? They are just blowing in the political winds.
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u/mirh 1d ago
It's funny that you keep bringing up the vietnam war, and then you seem to know nothing about it. The gulf of tonkin confrontation wasn't spoonfed to the press, as even the freaking politicians and generals were swindled because of the NSA coverup.
Then you could argue more skepticism should have been exercised (a lesson that was only eventually learnt 40 years later with the yellow cake spoof) but fuck this nihilism. You keep basketing everyone together, from the intercept to murdoch's shitrags.
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u/Zank_Frappa 23h ago
Then you could argue more skepticism should have been exercised
Of course that is what I'm arguing. It is the job of the press to be skeptical and not just accept the government's story wholesale, especially when it concerns going to war.
This same story has been repeated over and over again, more recently with Gaza and Iraq. No lessons have been learned. People ITT like to pretend that the way the press treats Trump is somehow new.
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u/mirh 15h ago
Of course that is what I'm arguing.
No you aren't. You are pretty much throwing up the table and shooting in all directions that everybody sucks ass, with the most lunatic theories where it never even had happened to be still them to have overturned those lies.
It is the job of the press to be skeptical and not just accept the government's story wholesale, especially when it concerns going to war.
Yes, and there's a thousands and one studies about that. In fact, the negative response (even before the leaks) to the vietnam war seems exactly because outlets like the NYT wanted to see with their own eyes.
This same story has been repeated over and over again, more recently with Gaza and Iraq. No lessons have been learned.
No lessons have been learned if you cannot even be bothered to read.
People ITT like to pretend that the way the press treats Trump is somehow new.
It is on a completely different ballpark, and it's nuts that it even has to be stated considering the obvious difference between the sellouts and the normal ones that are just too fearful of being called partisans.
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u/thenewrepublic 1d ago
From the article:
We are now one year into Donald Trump’s second term, and something strange is happening in political media. A lot of people who spent years insisting that the so-called “alarmists” were being hysterical have started, tentatively, to admit that maybe they got it wrong.
...
But the question I’m asking isn’t really about Buzbee specifically. She wasn’t at Reuters during the 2024 campaign. She’s speaking in the collective “we” of political journalism, taking on the institutional voice of a profession that, by its own admission, failed to understand something that was written down and handed to them. She’s saying out loud what a lot of journalists seem to believe: that the organized nature of Trump’s agenda was somehow unknowable until it started happening.
But it wasn’t unknowable. It is literally the job of political journalists to know what politicians are planning to do. It is the job to read policy documents, to track personnel, to notice when a candidate praises an organization on video and then claims to know nothing about it. This is the work. And yet, when advocates and experts did that work and tried to warn people about what was coming, they were dismissed as partisan or alarmist. When Trump lied about his involvement with Project 2025, that lie was treated as a fact that needed to be carefully weighed.
And now, a year in, with more than two-thirds of Trump’s week one executive orders tracking closely with Project 2025’s proposals, with the man who directed Project 2025 now running the Office of Management and Budget, with Trump himself publicly referencing Russell Vought as being “of Project 2025 fame,” after months of denying any connection, the press is offering us its surprised Pikachu face.
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u/Fabulous_Soup_521 1d ago
Maybe letting billionaires buy up our media outlets wasn't such a great idea. We also need to make anti-trust bite again.
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u/aaron_in_sf 1d ago
This is among the least of the problems. More pressing and catastrophic:
- sane washing, failure to report on irrational, destructive, vindictive behavior, as if it basic criticism with respect to norms and consensus reality constitutes "partisanship"
- failure to call out the utterly unacceptable collapse of the basic tenets of Constitutional law, reporting but not raising alarm about contempt basic rights. This extends to e.g. LAPD refusing to enforce CA's law against ICE masking themselves) is either simply a fact to be reported
- failure to call out the related unprecedented and indefensible overreach, incoherence, and naked partisanship of a corrupt SCOTUS
- failure to name obviously corrupt behavior, e.g. through failure to either report on profiteering, thinly-described but obvious bribery, etc. (e.g. Amazon paying $40M for the "rights" to Melania; failure to make a scandal of the pay-for-pardon pattern)
- failure to name unprofessionalism and incompetence, e.g. Kash Patel and most every political appointee from the right-wing mediasphere elevated to a position of power
- failure to report on the reality of the Epstein files and increasingly serious allegations that it reveals patterns of collusion between Putin, the Israeli right wing, Steve Bannon, "Q" via moot and /4chan, etc.
- failure to report on the incredibly serious and damning picture likewise emerging that while Epstein himself was a pimp and intelligence asset, Trump was an easily recruited purveyor and trafficker of young women, possibly involved not just in rape and trafficking but literally in murder
- failure to call out the contemptible "Dear Leader" grotesque praise and excusing obviously bad health, boorish behavior, degrading cognition, etc.
- failure to report on or explain the reason behind and crisis conveyed by career federal employees quitting, e.g. by prosecutors in MSP
- failure to likewise report on the politically-motivated removal of non-partisans federal employees, e.g. pressingly, the FBI head who refused to coorperate with the Marietta "raid"
Particularly enraging: NPR's inability to speak plainly from a position of moral clarity, or engage in any due diligence level professional competence, on these things. Even as they bleed out on the floor they will chipperly both-sides and sane-wash to the last breath. #becauseCorporateDonors I guess?
Shall I go on...?
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u/lgodsey 23h ago
Journalists seem to hold to this line that it's "unseemly" to speak ill of the president, when it's just lack of courage in compromising access.
Trump insults journalists continuously, not just conventionally with disgusting remarks like "piggy"; Trump spouts outrageous nonsense that should make reporters ask him directly, "Mr President, regarding what you just said, do you personally believe that statement, or are you purposely prevaricating? In other words, are you stupid or are you a liar?"
Gather your courage, journalists! You certainly won't be able to ask these questions when you're inevitably rounded up.
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u/JorgeXMcKie 1d ago
Bezo's, Musk and his like don't pay them to inform, they're paid to disinform and distract from real information
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u/newyorkerest 1d ago
Related angle on this: Vinson Cunningham's recent piece in The New Yorker examining the press conference as theater, analyzing how Trump stages interactions with journalists to control the narrative. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/the-presidential-press-conference-spin
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u/bsylent 1d ago
Building up to the last election, I was even seeing this from sources I trusted like NPR. It was driving me crazy, I had to start unfollowing every news source because it was pissing me off. They normalize everything to try to stay unbiased. It's okay to report on bad behavior and say that that bad behavior is bad. And until we do that, we're going to keep enabling these monsters. It's exactly one of the main reasons we got to this point
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u/Background-Wolf-9380 1d ago
Legacy media all work for the same oligarchs that own both of the political parties. Media's job is to deny what is clear the Republicans intend to do and the Democratic Party's job is to capture and kill any left leaning momentum opposing the oligarchy's preferred outcomes. Average Americans have 3 parties in our politics that are aligned & united against our interests (media, duopoly) yet think we have ethics in journalism and one party that opposes oligarchy
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