Conservatives know their normal (non-conservative) friends, colleagues and family members will be cruelly oppressed and will lose fundamental human rights. But as long as conservatives maintain their own rights, they are happy with that.
It’s bizarre and chilling to watch otherwise decent people delight in the misery of others. Conservatives truly, deeply enjoy watching vulnerable people suffer.
They know perfectly well but prefer the revenue to fulfilling their journalistic responsibility and acting ethically.
When news is a product to market and not a social responsibility this is the result. They’re selling a narrative and horse race delivers profits - also their delusion that kissing the ass of the guy that calls them the enemy might save them could be a factor.
Shameful how their response has been to cower and equivocate and not report objectively and clearly.
I want newspapers back. Eating breakfast and skimming the news in 10-20 pages was perfect. When you were done you just left the paper there for whoever wanted to read it next. That was it. Today’s newspapers cost as much as a small paperback book and are 6 pages.
Hold on, I’ll brb, there’s another cloud I have to shake my fist at outside.
The problem is that newspapers were kind of the only means to get the news in a concentrated form - now they are obsolete since everyone gets their news pretty much live and when the newspaper would be out the next morning it’s already old
They grasp it just fine, but they make money of covering him and have enough of said money to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions.
Back when Substack was getting grief for letting Nazis on, a bunch of people told me that making dangerous extremism illegal was absolutely the right thing to do and necessary, and a bunch of them asserted that Nazi speech was already forbidden on some level in the US.
I told them that any legal restrictions on speech will instantly be used, vigorously, against what the people in power think is “dangerous extremism,” and not with objective fairness against the stuff that’s actually dangerous extremism, and so it’s a bad idea to have those restrictions.
Every single one of them lectured me confidently about how that’s not how it works and I was wrong.
The article isn’t about “Trump’s manipulation of the media”, it’s about the sensationalism that revenue-driven news falls into, both by necessity and by convenience, and how that model is unequipped to handle rhetoric that is ‘slow-burning’.
Trump is not playing 4D chess, he’s just being his usual horrible self each day, but the media is unable to simply run “Trump still horrible” each day, so they end up treating his current horrible-ness as a new baseline after the shock wears off, which just normalizes his behavior.
It’s like the inverse of the boy crying wolf, where the wolves really are attacking each day, but since everyone “knows” that, the town crier kid stops telling people the wolves are attacking unless they attack in some novel way, and over time the wolves attacking isn’t even ‘bad’, it’s just how the villagers live.
Most likely its a mix of cognitive dissonance (it can’t happen here) and not really caring as theyre mostly well off liberals (oh well, if it does, im wealthy so my life won’t seriously change that much!).
Wild thing is I am white, cis and basically hetero…
…and I don’t see how anyone can not take this all seriously.
Lots of non white, non hetero talking heads on major channels that don’t seem to care either.
A lot of it is just the lucky few that made the right connection, or were born into wealth, who never had any life destroying tragedy ruin their career, who had reserve finances or other contacts or safety nets to rely on…
Ive met loads if people like that. They’ll give you all the emotional support in the world, until either disagree with them about nearly anything somewhat serious, or if you ask for help that might actually cost them some time or money.
There’s programs for that! I donate to a charity that… yeah, its all underfunded, extremely difficult to apply to and pass.
Then they get angry because in their head theyre a good person, but this grates upon their fundamental belief in a meritocratic society, causes cognitive dissonance.
theintercept.com
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