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Will the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/trump-2020-media.htmlWill the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020?
We have a second chance. Lets not blow it.
By Frank Bruni
Jan. 11, 2019
...
Trump tortures us. Deliberately, yes, but Im referring to the ways in which he keeps yanking our gaze his way. I mean the tough choices that he, more than his predecessors in the White House, forces us to make. His demand for television airtime on Tuesday night was a perfect example: We had to weigh a request in line with precedent against a president out of line when it comes to truth. We had to wrestle with and figure out when and how to resist his talent for using us as vessels for propaganda.
Our success or failure will affect our stature at a time of rickety public trust in us. It will raise or lower the temperature of civic discourse, which is perilously hot. Above all, it will have an impact on who takes the oath of office in January 2021. Democracies dont just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course and thrive in whatever atmosphere their media has created.
The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time, the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.
Thomas Patterson of Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has been analyzing that coverage since Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Patterson found that for much of that year, the number of stories about Trump in the countrys most influential newspapers and on its principal newscasts significantly exceeded what his support in polls at the time justified.
And those stories were predominantly positive. The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls, Patterson wrote in one of his reports about the election. In stark contrast, stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015 were mostly negative.
... I asked Rather what he was most struck by in the 2016 campaign, and he instantly mentioned Trumps horrific implication, in public remarks that August, that gun enthusiasts could rid themselves of a Clinton presidency by assassinating her.
Id almost forgotten it. So many lesser shocks so quickly overwrote it. Rather wasnt surprised. It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time, he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We cant privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.
...
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Will the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020? (Original Post)
dalton99a
Jan 2019
OP
Zoonart
(11,844 posts)1. The answer is YES....
they are already having panel discussion gaming out the Emergency Order for him and his nit-wit crew. Laying out a "theoretical" game plan for him to seize autocratic power and framing it as a way for him to WIN. WTFF?
Turbineguy
(37,312 posts)2. Trump is a spectacle.
But not yet grisly enough to turn the cameras away.
Va Lefty
(6,252 posts)3. Many in the media have yet to acknowledge their complicity in '16
onecaliberal
(32,812 posts)4. Yes. It's been going on since day one. It will not stop.
marble falls
(57,063 posts)5. After his little campaign speech last Tueday, why even ask - of course.
CrispyQ
(36,442 posts)6. Of course they will.
"The media is only as liberal as the conservative corporations that own it."
From a bumper sticker I once saw. A horse race generates more ad revenue & ratings, so we will have a horse race. I wonder how much they will try to muck up the democratic primary & try to pick our candidate for us?
Runningdawg
(4,514 posts)7. It only stops when we pull the plug