I think his preferred one is impractical. That is to use a split screen and call out the lies and bullshit in real time. That just isn't going to happen. But not airing the shitshow live, and then reporting only the true facts -- mostly provided by others -- covers up the Resident's derangement. As Froomkin and others note, this is a pervasive problem. Reporters summarize whatever parts of his pronouncement are reasonably coherent, or translate them into coherency, and leave out much of the insanity. That he is ignorant, stupid, and mentally ill are all facts the public needs to see. That's why Froomkin proposes the split screen. But Froomkin quotes Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen, who normally favors putting everything on display:
But these are not ordinary times and this is no ordinary president. After more than three years in office — and more than 16,000 false or misleading statements — Trump's word simply cannot be trusted. At a moment of true national cataclysm, allowing him to use the bully pulpit in such an irresponsible manner is a risk we can't afford to take.…
News outlets should thus treat Trump's public statements like propaganda and misinformation — because that's what they are. Fact-checking is essential, but it's not enough. Airing his press conferences live, without immediate correction — which, because of the volume of Trump's lies, is almost impossible to pull off — risks letting false information trickle out to the public.
Indeed. Don't give him the air time.
Update: The TV networks are not now and have never been under any obligation to broadcast any presidential speech, press conference or other public appearance of any kind live. In fact, presidents typically make public addresses of one kind or another several times a week, and the vast majority of them are not broadcast live. Not broadcasting a presidential appearance or campaign rally live is not "censorship," private media corporations have the right to choose what they want to broadcast live. They don't broadcast my public addresses, which I make several times a year, but they are not censoring me. If you want to know what the ostensible president said, there will always be a transcript, which you can read. Peckerhead, you are a moron and you are hereby banned.
4 comments:
Shitler needs to be grounded. That is very difficult to do with someone who has narcissistic personality disorder. It's also difficult to do with a corporate media that is thinking only about ratings, as insane as that is. Hard to wrap my mind around that reality--that many people, including in the media, are in a de facto conspiracy to commit spiritual and actual suicide. I wish just one person standing on a podium next to Shitler would step up to the mike, point directly to him, and say something like:
"The man to my right is seriously mentally ill, and it is a tragedy that he is in the position of leader. He is the worst case I've ever seen of narcissistic personality disorder. He is incapable of caring about anything or anyone. He is a criminal, a bigot, and a sexual abuse. You would not trust your children to such a sick person. If we want to survive as a nation and, indeed, as a species, he needs to be immediately removed from power--and no one, absolutely no one, can vote for another Republican for any U.S. office if we are to survive. This is not a joke. This is reality."
My wife and I can no longer stand to watch these offensive shitfests. We watched about three minutes Thursday night and there was so much bullshit in that time that we immediately changed the channel to something else. The news media have done the county a major disservice since the coverage of Trump during the campaign by pretending that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.
I appreciate the above comment. Concise and on target. This was the fear from the beginning--the normalization of the abnormal.
I continue to be amazed at the ability of one uniformly corrupt, intensely mentally-ill individual, in a land geared to steep power toward Caucasian males who appear to be wealthy, to seemingly create his own reality and imposed it on the outer world, simultaneously seeming to manage to avoid all consequences legal, physical, and financial.
I suppose people have been doing it for eons.
I've always been confused about how we define murder. If it is something like "voluntarily taking an action that you know will kill people who would otherwise live", and there are no consequential extenuating circumstances, then tobacco company executives would be mass murderers, for example. Even if you can't point to any specific person and say with 100% certainty that smoking, and no other factor, killed him or her it is still true that smoking killed hundreds of thousands people. That executive is as surely a murderer as Charles Starkweather or Timothy McVeigh were.
In 1946 at Numremberg we also decided that "I was just following orders" is not a defense. (Although that dictum seems to be riddled with exceptions.)
So what should we say about someone who knowingly disseminates deadly lies because they fear that a powerful person will be angry with them if they don't? Legally we don't call that murder (it would put too many 'respectable' people at risk), but morally I don't see a lot of daylight between this and the cases described above. It doesn't really matter that it is impossible to link any single death to a specific falsehood that was propagated.
Most of the people involved are intelligent enough to realize this, but, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, its really hard "to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Its also easier to deal with when the actual deaths become just a 'statistic'. (Thank you, Mark Twain.)
Off topic:
I see the same logic applying to future deaths precipitated by people who deny human causes for climate change. I suspect that several of history's greatest killers are alive today; hell of a legacy to leave behind.
Post a Comment