Hatfield wrote:
Like a few of you, I teach in public school and our Hispanic students are freaking out. With tears in their eyes, they ask genuine questions like, "How long do I have before they kick me out of the country?"
He's a trump supporterB wrote:I can't read all this shit. Can you guys summarize Bi_3's problems for me? 20 words or less.
Again, this article makes the mistake of grouping the media into some monolithic apparatus with a uniform agenda and ideology. And as I mentioned earlier, the amount of ink spent on cataloging and inquiring about the motivations of Trump voters in the rust belt was pretty substantial. It would have been far preferable for local reporters to be covering these issues, whether from national or local publications, but the fact that that did not occur is due far more to an untenable business reality that has gutted newspapers in smaller markets than the machinations of some liberal elite. To wipe away the criticism of Trump and probing his supporter's motivations as a symptom of journalism's "smugness", IMO, is about as myopic as saying that every Trump supporter has a KKK sheet in the closet ready for use.
A+Bi_3 wrote:If you dare....
CBS news wrote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary- ... tion-2016/
Commentary: The unbearable smugness of the press
Last Updated Nov 10, 2016 12:01 PM EST
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!
That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.
Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.
That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.
As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further -- fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup -- which starts the cycle anew.
There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.
Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.
What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.
We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.
That's what's I'm thinking as well, and why I'm interested to see what he does. Though the cabinet position for the branch of the gov't I work for is distressing me because the person I've seen knocked around for it really hates us.Strat wrote:And the theory i just started working on (like 3 seconds before the start o this post) is that the silent majority that snuck up on everyone, are probably not racist but detest the system and hillary clinton. The vocal minority are racist, bigots, and dumb.
Work in progress here though
Couldn't disagree with you assessment more.digster wrote:Again, this article makes the mistake of grouping the media into some monolithic apparatus with a uniform agenda and ideology. And as I mentioned earlier, the amount of ink spent on cataloging and inquiring about the motivations of Trump voters in the rust belt was pretty substantial. It would have been far preferable for local reporters to be covering these issues, whether from national or local publications, but the fact that that did not occur is due far more to an untenable business reality that has gutted newspapers in smaller markets than the machinations of some liberal elite. To wipe away the criticism of Trump and probing his supporter's motivations as a symptom of journalism's "smugness", IMO, is about as myopic as saying that every Trump supporter has a KKK sheet in the closet ready for use.
In general though, it would also probably help to have a definition of what the "media" actually is when people are criticizing it for smugness.
But are those journalists just writing for their audience? The editors let that condescending tone ring out.tragabigzanda wrote:Any time I saw a piece profiling Trump's non-racist supporters -- in the NYT, the Washington Post, Politico, and a number of small regional papers (I went through a spate of reading major newspapers in PA, FL, OH, and more, and talked about it a bit on RM) -- it was always presented as almost a quaint afterthought: smaller headline font, waaay lower on the web page than the "Trump Grabs Pussy!" or "Hillary Writes Emails" headlines that were always front and center, and with a tone that was almost condescendingly sympathetic ("Here in Smallsville, Jim the auto mechanic leads a simple life and has simple pleasures...", that sort of thing).digster wrote:Again, this article makes the mistake of grouping the media into some monolithic apparatus with a uniform agenda and ideology. And as I mentioned earlier, the amount of ink spent on cataloging and inquiring about the motivations of Trump voters in the rust belt was pretty substantial. It would have been far preferable for local reporters to be covering these issues, whether from national or local publications, but the fact that that did not occur is due far more to an untenable business reality that has gutted newspapers in smaller markets than the machinations of some liberal elite. To wipe away the criticism of Trump and probing his supporter's motivations as a symptom of journalism's "smugness", IMO, is about as myopic as saying that every Trump supporter has a KKK sheet in the closet ready for use.
In general though, it would also probably help to have a definition of what the "media" actually is when people are criticizing it for smugness.
BurtBurtReynolds wrote:And good job from the Left on proving they are every bit as violent as the Right, if not more so. deplorable
Hey why aren't you out torching a artisan mayonnaise shop right now? Because Trump.Strat wrote:BurtBurtReynolds wrote:And good job from the Left on proving they are every bit as violent as the Right, if not more so. deplorable
I still dont think bernie Sanders is wrong and i think Bernie is actually acknowledging that trump also tapped into that. For a family of 4, making $50,000 is pretty fucking poor. Not living in shacks in the backwoods poor, but pretty goddamn weak financially.tragabigzanda wrote:Anyone care to poke holes in this?
http://jezebel.com/please-stop-saying-p ... 1788813761
Mayonnaise is amazing. Why would i destroy that?BurtReynolds wrote:Hey why aren't you out torching a artisan mayonnaise shop right now? Because Trump.Strat wrote:BurtBurtReynolds wrote:And good job from the Left on proving they are every bit as violent as the Right, if not more so. deplorable
tragabigzanda wrote:Any time I saw a piece profiling Trump's non-racist supporters -- in the NYT, the Washington Post, Politico, and a number of small regional papers (I went through a spate of reading major newspapers in PA, FL, OH, and more, and talked about it a bit on RM) -- it was always presented as almost a quaint afterthought: smaller headline font, waaay lower on the web page than the "Trump Grabs Pussy!" or "Hillary Writes Emails" headlines that were always front and center, and with a tone that was almost condescendingly sympathetic ("Here in Smallsville, Jim the auto mechanic leads a simple life and has simple pleasures...", that sort of thing).digster wrote:Again, this article makes the mistake of grouping the media into some monolithic apparatus with a uniform agenda and ideology. And as I mentioned earlier, the amount of ink spent on cataloging and inquiring about the motivations of Trump voters in the rust belt was pretty substantial. It would have been far preferable for local reporters to be covering these issues, whether from national or local publications, but the fact that that did not occur is due far more to an untenable business reality that has gutted newspapers in smaller markets than the machinations of some liberal elite. To wipe away the criticism of Trump and probing his supporter's motivations as a symptom of journalism's "smugness", IMO, is about as myopic as saying that every Trump supporter has a KKK sheet in the closet ready for use.
In general though, it would also probably help to have a definition of what the "media" actually is when people are criticizing it for smugness.
I'm sure there is a Trump supporter somewhere in Colorado you could assault.Strat wrote:Mayonnaise is amazing. Why would i destroy that?BurtReynolds wrote:Hey why aren't you out torching a artisan mayonnaise shop right now? Because Trump.Strat wrote:BurtBurtReynolds wrote:And good job from the Left on proving they are every bit as violent as the Right, if not more so. deplorable