10 ms·

Did you work during the Trump era? Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their

• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major candidate. Media coverage was hysterical at times (at other times, their concerns seemed appropriate and valuable).
  • ss108 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • barbariangrunge 4y ago
      > Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight
      • at_a_remove 4y ago
        That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge populations. It's kind of wild.
      • bojo 4y ago
        Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face and threatening to fight me over our differences in opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I told him that I think we have more in common than not, then went inside. We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.
      • ss108 4y ago
        > You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't. > Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes what is an insane fact.
        • ESTheComposer 4y ago
          QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals. Black and white thinking is stupid in this day and age yet it seems to persist
          • somewhat_drunk 4y ago
            The ideals of Qanon were implicitly accepted into the American right, and have been working their way into the mainstream. How do you think MTG got where she is? The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't, because a significant percentage of your group would be gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of what the Q-tards believe.
            • fwungy 4y ago
              MTG got where she is because she's a representative from a small, hard red district. The whole country could absolutely hate a representative and it makes no difference because it's the populations of those small districts that vote.
              • somewhat_drunk 4y ago
                MTG got to where she is because she was willing to parrot Qanon bullshit to gain the position. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/marjorie-taylor-greene-blames-internet-qanon-beliefs-1234657579/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/marjorie... https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-quarter-of-republicans-believe-central-views-of-qanon-conspiracy-movement https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...
      • HDThoreaun 4y ago
        Mask off, at least 46% of Americans are bad people. Most people in every country are chiefly interested in furthering their own goals.
        • ESTheComposer 4y ago
          Wanting to further your own goals !== "bad people". You can want to further your own goals while helping others.
        • denton-scratch 4y ago
          I believe this "further your own goals" thing is a particularly American thing. There's a saying that Americans vote with their pocket-books. It does appear to me that whatever other policies they claim to espouse, when it comes to the crunch they vote for tax reductions. I suppose that's partly because of pork-barrel politics, and the huge tides of money that wash around US election campaigns. If all the politicians are bought and paid-for, then they can't be trusted to handle taxpayers' money properly.
      • yamtaddle 4y ago
        Nah, about 15-20%. Hillary's "basket of deplorables", as stated (IIRC "about a third" of Trump supporters was how she put it—her entire point was that most weren't actually awful). That was just true. Generous, even. The rest were along for the ride for various reasons, often because they felt compelled to vote for the candidate most likely to support a pro-life position.
      • rootusrootus 4y ago
        Maybe not 46%, but c'mon. No Democrats ever came up to me at a restaurant and told my three year old they hoped Daddy was smart enough for vote for Hillary. I don't recall any attempts by Democratic supporters to run a Trump bus off the road. I've never seen the equivalent of "Fuck your Feelings" flags flown by liberals. Remind me of the years long conserted effort on the part of liberals to claim a Republican politician was born in some other country. How many of that 46% you refer to believe to this day that Obama is a secret muslim or Kenyan? Please be honest.
        • refurb 4y ago
          You clearly haven’t lived in San Francisco if you think crappy behavior is limited to the right. The vile they’ll spew at someone who doesn’t adhere 100% to their views is pretty shocking. And in terms of violence didn’t some Democrat shoot at a bunch of Republicans playing baseball a few years ago?
      • somewhat_drunk 4y ago
        >You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people They're not all bad people, most are just stupid.
    • anononaut 4y ago
      This line of reasoning is why media has gotten away with being as deliberately dishonest as it is.
    • rayiner 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • tptacek 4y ago
        Lots of bad ideas are common to ordinary people around the world.
        • rayiner 4y ago
          And if you adopt a moral framework that emphasizes those common ideas in defining the category of “bad people” (or perhaps “deplorables”) then you’ve got a powerful justification for elites to dominate ordinary people. It’s an inversion. We used to hate GOP voters for working on Wall Street and at McKinsey and laying off workers, while bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. But now the target is the traditional views of nationality, sexuality, etc., that GOP voters have in common with those laid of workers and Iraqis and Afghans.
          • tptacek 4y ago
            That's true, so don't define categories of "bad people", and just stick to categorizing the bad ideas.
    • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
      You can find unflattering footage of anybody's supporters. I was never a Trump supporter, but as someone who has friends and family who are/were supporters, I resent the situation where people think like you do. In fact, I think that attitude is part of why these people end up voting for Trump. They know what the cool kids on the blue team say about them when they aren't in the room (hell, even when they are in the room). Not to give all Trump supporters a pass, but they're not all (or even most) the cartoon character you have in mind.
      • ss108 4y ago
        I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals. I believe in God. There's no way I can be friends with people who, at best, only pay lip service to those concepts while using them to further patent evil. To be clear, I'm not really on the "blue team" either. But that's a team that hasn't been taken over by the worst of its fans, nor is it motivated by things such as xenophobia, willful and prideful ignorance, and malice. I think the view that you are advocating for basically bends morality to accommodate the fact that so many people have to do and believe x. I'm a religious person. I don't believe in changing the criteria just to avoid an unsavory conclusion about people. (To be clear, I mention the God thing not so much as a "holier than thou" thing, but in allusion to the fact that these differences cannot be bridged--I find it incredibly idiotic when people say things like "we need to talk to each other more to stop the division". Such a thing would only fuel the division, in my opinion.)
        • seti0Cha 4y ago
          > I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals. Ironically, the behavior you describe is immoral in my view. I also am a religious person, and I also don't believe in bending morals or that talk will heal all disagreements. However, with political opinions, the primary reason otherwise well intentioned people support bad things is that they don't understand that they are bad. Shunning someone actively makes that situation worse. Sure you can't win people over by arguments, but you can influence them gradually, and if they are your friends, you should want to do that for their own good.
    • refurb 4y ago
      You realize Hilary lost election using that same argument? Labeling your political opponents as “trash” turns off a lot of people.
      • somewhat_drunk 4y ago
        Sometimes spades need to be labeled as such.
        • anononaut 4y ago
          You're a jaded, delusional, and bitter redditor.
          • somewhat_drunk 4y ago
            Jaded, absolutely. Bitter? Rarely. But delusional? Not at all. Please feel free to embarrass yourself attempting to prove that anything I've stated is incorrect.
        • epiphonium 4y ago
          [dead]
        • refurb 4y ago
          That kind of rhetoric sounds awfully similar to what led to the tragedies in Cambodia, Yugoslavia and Indonesia. I hope your political views mature someday to the point you realize how counterproductive it is.
          • ss108 4y ago
            Really? Recognizing that people who vote out of bigotry and ignorance are trash is what led to that? Calling out people who openly and proudly believe in conspiracy theories is what led to that? Assuming you aren't a Trump supporter, what would they have to do in order for you to believe they are bad and need to be called out as such? Start lynching Blacks en masse? Firebombing the offices of lawyers who represent asylum seekers? My impression from this thread is that you'd make an excuse even if they started doing those things.
  • Merad 4y ago
    If you really think that this started with Trump, you must not have been paying attention before. The media (conservative media in particular) hounded Obama about some extraordinarily stupid things. Famously there was a significant controversy one time about the color of his suit [0]. I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar treatment. Maybe the prominence of clickbait/outrage journalism didn't come about until the end of his presidency? Or maybe the incidents have just faded from my memory. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_tan_suit_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_tan_suit_controversy
    • colpabar 4y ago
      I don't remember that one, but I do remember fox talking about how obama was "disrespecting the office" because he took his suit jacket off in the oval office. It was at that point that I realized fox is not a serious news organization, because who could seriously think that was worth talking about? And then when trump got two scoops of ice cream, every major "news" outlet except fox ran stories about it, and I decided to stop taking any of them seriously, because they exist to make money by pissing people off, not to help us understand what's going on in the world.
    • q1w2 4y ago
      It got way WAY worse with Trump. Many news organizations happily threw out their journalistic integrity to "fight Trump". Honest reporting became taboo. You were either FOR or AGAINST Trump, and anyone not choosing a side was just secretly on the other side.
      • brewdad 4y ago
        [flagged]
        • yamtaddle 4y ago
          Some of the stuff they covered was ridiculous, too, but they guy was an absolute machine for creating gaffes and outrageous behavior. Giving him the same treatment as any other candidate would still have looked like "picking on him". If anything, they didn't pick on him enough for some things—I still can't believe the man became President after suggesting his supporters might assassinate his opponent, if she won. And that wasn't spin or bias, that's just what he did, the whole thing's available for anyone to watch. When he did that and his campaign kept trucking along without a hitch was the moment I decided our democracy itself was in danger (which turned out to be very right—maybe I should join a think-tank or become a political commentator or something, I also got a ton of the course of Iraq more-correct than most commentators)
• tablespoon 4y ago
  > Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth. For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it. I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.
• UhUhUhUh 4y ago
  The NYT and Bush was earlier.