Sunday, September 01, 2024

Today's News: "But how is the chicken cooked?"

Sometimes I have thought that bloggers like me are too "down" on the media.
And then then I see how many in the American media persist in living in a myth world where they can pretend there is still a reasonable choice to make about whether Harris or Trump would be "better" for the country. Writer David Sedaris says this:


Some American media keep pretending Trump actually makes sense, and that the decision to vote for him or for Harris is just an ordinary choice between two credible candidates. 
But while Trump can charm people when he tries, basically he is dumb as fuck. 


The New York Times seems to have decided about a year ago to dislike Biden and they have now extended this antipathy to Harris. 
Their coverage of the convention was pathetic, and they persist in covering the Trump and Harris campaigns just as poorly:

 


This week they published an article implying that the Harris plan for helping people buy houses is comparable to Trump's fascism of jackboot thugs deporting millions.
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4 comments:

Cap said...

One of the important functions of elite media, such as the NYT and WaPo, is to encourage apathy. As Herman and Chomsky pointed out many years ago, "in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman 'games of the circus' that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo."

The status quo in the US is an oligarchy that presents voters with the choice of two parties, both of which act in the interests of oligarchs and ignore popular dissent. The illusion of democracy must be maintained, and that won't happen if the GOP collapses under the weight of Trump's criminality and mental illness. The NYT and other elite media do what they must to conceal and excuse Trump's stupidity and depravity. They've been doing that for 10 years, hard to expect change now.

6:04 am
Purple library guy said...

What Cap said. Plus, the Democrats of late have been showing occasional signs of doing things that are useful to people, in ways that could harm oligarchs either directly or indirectly. That is, some high in the Democratic party have recognized that both to maintain the status quo and to get people to vote for them, they are going to have to throw them some bones, make some actual differences to people's lives. And that requires either taking money that could have gone to tax cuts for the rich, or making some explicit breaks with free market orthodoxy, by, say, endorsing unions or opposing monopoly. Explicit breaks with orthodox pro-oligarch ideology feel to some top dogs like they could threaten the whole edifice.

So all in all, I think there's a significant segment of elite opinion (including a still very strong, up till recently completely dominant, section of the Democratic party apparatus) which rejects this kind of compromise and would rather have fascism than mild pro-citizen reform. They want the completely useless, triangulating Democrats or nothing. The NYT seems to be largely part of this segment.

10:51 am
Cathie from Canada said...

Yes, I am terrified that there will be enough elite push-back against Kamala that she will end up losing this election -- Trump isn't "their kind of guy" either, but they know they can boss him around.

12:54 am
Anonymous said...

Are the US voters so fickle as to switch loyalties between so different candidates so easily?
Or is the whole process just another media scramble for viewers, listeners advertisers and product sales?
The excited states is not named so for it's rationality.
Perhaps the close race is a media promotion of a self serving advertising machine that is out of touch with reality?
TB


8:33 pm

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