Media Bias

[Seabass]

Wasn't Rupert's son supposed to take over and make make Fox News less crazy? What's taking him so long? I don't think the human race and Fox News can coexist for much longer...

[Brian Peacock]

It's now official, the USA are a banana republic

Yeah, but at least that's better than being an Obama republic.



See what I did there? Obama sounds like banana, eh? Eh? It's a joke. Eh?

[Brian Peacock]

I remember this guy. 42 introduced me to his writing.

One in, one out.

[Svartalf]

It's now official, the USA are a banana republic

Yeah, but at least that's better than being an Obama republic.



See what I did there? Obama sounds like banana, eh? Eh? It's a joke. Eh?

can't say I have much love for obie, but anything is better than the current incarnation of Dr Evil.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, Obie was a bit wan.

[Woodbutcher]

I kenobilieve that!

[JimC]

[Brian Peacock]

What?

[L'Emmerdeur]

How dare they! Fifty lashes and a stiff fine, prison time for the ringleaders.

'Frank Luntz Wants World Series Boo-ers "Held Accountable"'

There's no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks said in "A League of Their Own."

But apparently Frank Luntz thinks North Korean-style demands for loyalty to "Dear Leader" in baseball is perfectly okay.

Luntz graced the soundstage of Ingraham Angle Monday night to declare that (not making this up) the baseball fans at Game 5 of the World Series should be "held accountable" for booing Donald Trump.

FRANK LUNTZ: The fact is, they should hold those fans accountable. Don't boo the president! You may disagree with him, you may say that he's not what you wanted, but you don't boo him, you show respect for him. And I'll tell you something, I think this event is going to have an impact...

[Seabass]

Fuck Frank Luntz, that Gamorrean-guard-lookin' motherfucker...

[Seabass]

[Brian Peacock]

"Booo! Booooooooooooo! Booo! Boo! Booooooooooooo! Booo..."

[Seabass]

With impeachment, America’s epistemic crisis has arrived
Can the right-wing machine hold the base in an alternate reality long enough to get through the next election?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... mic-crisis

Back in 2017, I wrote a piece speculating that the Mueller hearings might bring America’s epistemic crisis to a head. That crisis involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality. We have sorted ourselves into polarized factions living in different worlds, not just of values, but of facts. Communication between them is increasingly difficult.

I wondered what might happen if Mueller offered clear, incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt. Would Republicans be able to prevent supporters from ever finding out? What if the truth was revealed but it had no power, no effect at all, because half the country had been walled off from it? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that can overcome our polarization?

As it happened, the hearings didn’t play out that way. Mueller’s report and testimony were oddly oblique and muted, with notable omissions. It proved relatively easy for the president and his supplicant media to dismiss the whole thing as a dud.

Now we may experience the stress test that Mueller never produced: whether the right can shield itself from plain facts in plain sight.

Unlike Mueller’s report, the story behind the impeachment case is relatively simple: Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but Trump withheld it as part of a sustained campaign to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation of his political rival Joe Biden’s family. There’s a record of him doing it. There are multiple credible witnesses to the phone call and larger campaign. Several Trump allies and administration officials have admitted to it on camera. Trump himself admitted to it on the White House lawn.

REPORTER: What exactly did you hope the Ukrainian president would do about the Bidens?

TRUMP: "I would think that if they were honest about it, they'd start a major investigation" https://t.co/oMb1cjsx4T

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) November 13, 2019

It’s just very, very obvious that he did it. It’s very obvious he and his associates don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And it’s very obvious there is something wrong with it. Holding US foreign policy hostage to personal political favors is straightforward abuse of power, precisely the sort of thing the Founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution.

It’s a clearly impeachable pattern of action, documented and attested to by multiple witnesses, confessed to multiple times, in violation of longstanding political precedent and a moral consensus that was, until 2016, universal. Compared to Mueller, that is a much more difficult test of the right’s ability to obscure, distract, and polarize.

Right now, the right’s messaging machine is sputtering a bit, cycling through defenses — it didn’t happen, Trump’s not competent enough to do it, it was a failed quid pro quo so it doesn’t count, he did it but it’s not impeachable — that contradict one another from day to day.

Can the machine successfully hold the right-wing base in an alternate reality and throw up enough fog to keep the general public at bay for long enough to get through the next election? It seems challenging, given the facts on record, but this is just the sort of challenge the machine was built for.

Let’s quickly review how we got here.

The rise of tribal epistemology

continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... mic-crisis

[L'Emmerdeur]

That is an excellent piece, but I think that the author is too optimistic. As far as I can tell, the epistemic break has already passed the 'final and irreparable' point. Trumpists are completely in thrall to the right wing media bubble (Bullshit Mountain, in John Stewart's words) and objective reality, when it comes to political and particular cultural matters, is simply dismissed and ignored as a lie.

[Sean Hayden]

It's unforgivable what Fox is doing to so many Americans.