Jernalism!

[Thad]

NBC News, NY Times, Washington Post Roundly Called Out for Horribly Irresponsible Framing of Covid Cases in Fully Vaccinated People

[Thad]

Where are the anti-war voices?

We have reason to believe that this is not an accident. On Wednesday, Popular Information spoke to a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible:

I’ve been in political media for over two decades, and I have never experienced something like this before. Not only can I not get people booked on shows, but I can’t even get TV bookers who frequently book my guests to give me a call back…

I’ve fed sources to reporters, who end up not quoting the sources, but do quote multiple voices who are critical of the president and/or put the withdrawal in a negative light.

I turn on TV and watch CNN and, frankly, a lot of MSNBC shows, and they’re presenting it as if there’s not a voice out there willing to defend the president and his decision to withdraw. But I offered those very shows those voices, and the shows purposely decided to shut them out.

In so many ways this feels like Iraq and 2003 all over again. The media has coalesced around a narrative, and any threat to that narrative needs to be shut out.

[Brantly B.]

If the narrative is "Biden shouldn't have torn down a really, really, really obvious facade" then I think the MSM is showing its face a bit much.

[Thad]

At a high level, the narrative is that War is Serious and Patriotic, and therefore anyone who is opposed to war is Unserious and Unpatriotic. It's an extremely strong bias in American culture, but even as low an opinion as I have of the news media, I'm a little surprised by the total lack of self-reflection, by nobody seeming to acknowledge that, y'know, maybe we should have listened to all those people who told us 20 years ago that this was going to happen, and maybe we should listen to them now.

That's not to say there's nothing to criticize about how the withdrawal was handled. In particular, I'm furious at how badly the administration is letting refugees down. But I'm seeing way too much "we shouldn't have withdrawn" and not nearly enough "we shouldn't have gone to war in the first place." A limited mission to go in and get bin Laden would have been one thing, but our Executive Branch was populated by people who'd been looking for an excuse to establish a beachhead to fight a perpetual war in the middle-east, that's what we fucking got, that was always a terrible fucking idea, and if it was too much to ask the spineless shitweasels in the newsmedia to say so at the time, it really shouldn't be too much to ask now.

[Friday]

As you said before though, that would be admitting that America was the bad guy. We went in 20 years ago for entirely bad reasons that a good guy country like America would never ever do because America is only a good guy and never a bad guy, ever, and that's why we can't teach critical race theory.

Despite my phrasing, I'm not being flippant. It's important to remember that the mainstream media, at best, is centrist. And what's centrist spell when you run it through the special decoder ring? That's right! R-E-P-U- get the idea.

It helps to think of Dems (who are centrists) and centrists as Republicans with some changes instead of an entirely different beast. How many registered Democrats were against MLK? A lot. They're not the enlightened party. And their news media isn't either.

Here, let me give you a quick and dirty run down

MAGA - Brainwashed/malignant psychopath racist homophobe transphobe idiot who thinks America can do no wrong and sucks corporate dick
Non-Trumper Republican - racist homophobe transphobe idiot who thinks America can do no wrong and sucks corporate dick
Centrist - racist transphobe idiot who thinks America can do no wrong and sucks corporate dick
Democrat - idiot who thinks America can do no wrong and sucks corporate dick, often but not always racist

[Brantly B.]

After three ignominious defeats* I think people are starting to come around to the idea that we maybe aren't actually that good at this.

* Fine, two ignominious defeats and an ignominious stalemate.

[Friday]

Before Vietnam was "the war we lost" but now it's just one in a series. People can rationalize a single loss, it's harder when it starts to turn into a pattern. So they're upset. Remember that 80% of human beings are the same political party that their parents were. It's not like these people are doing deep dives into political theory or philosophy or any kind of introspection. Democrats are mostly my mom. We make fun of the other side for being mindless about their beliefs but every time I ask my mom a question about politics all she does is regurgitate (and mangle) talking points too. The behavior is identical. It's just the Demo talking points aren't as completely awful and vile.

My mom married a republican (back when that was still possible) so I am statistically unable to "copy" my parents, but I can remember just believing the shit they would tell me as a kid. Even the stuff that contradicted.

[Mongrel]

To be fair, the ignominious stalemate happened because no one was stupid enough to want to go to direct, potentially-nuclear war with China. Well, no one other than MacArthur.

How much of the current state of either Korea is counted as a resulting victory or failure is kind of a messy secondary question.


EDIT: Or wait, do you mean Iraq II as the stalemate? I tend to roll all these middle-east wars into one big giant post-9/11 idiotball.

[Thad]

As you said before though, that would be admitting that America was the bad guy. We went in 20 years ago for entirely bad reasons that a good guy country like America would never ever do because America is only a good guy and never a bad guy, ever, and that's why we can't teach critical race theory.

Despite my phrasing, I'm not being flippant. It's important to remember that the mainstream media, at best, is centrist. And what's centrist spell when you run it through the special decoder ring? That's right! R-E-P-U- get the idea.

But I've also often said that their idea of where the center is and where it actually is are very different things. And often the media are more responsible for shaping what the conventional wisdom is than reflecting it.

A large majority of Americans favored withdrawing from Afghanistan. That's a fact, and one that's not at all clear from the MSM's reporting on this story.

How many registered Democrats were against MLK? A lot. They're not the enlightened party.

It's a little complicated to talk about Democrats and MLK, given that the Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of the 1950s, precisely because a Democratic president passed a bunch of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. But yeah if he were alive today I think it's reasonable to believe he'd get much the same treatment that BLM does -- Republicans would hate him, most Democrats would try to split the baby and alternately praise him while saying certain elements of his belief system are just too radical and we need to distance ourselves from them, and a handful of (mostly young, motsly minority) Democrats would say "No, that guy's 100% correct" and be treated as dangerous radicals themselves.

[Friday]

shaping what the conventional wisdom is than reflecting it.

Oh, yeah, agree 100%. My mom's mangled talking points are a reflection of the news she watches.

My point was the news is RUN by these centrist democrat assholes, and it's a reflection of THEIR opinions and beliefs. Then I sort of just rambled on about rank and file dems like my mom, which muddied the issue.

it's reasonable to believe he'd get much the same treatment that BLM does

I remember seeing people just directly comparing the newspaper comics made in the 1950s against the criticisms of BLM, and they were like 1:1. Like you said, the right hates him/BLM and calls them evil, and the centrists say shit like "I agree with your goals but disagree with your violent methods".

Something something lukewarm acceptance.

[Friday]

EDIT: Or wait, do you mean Iraq II as the stalemate? I tend to roll all these middle-east wars into one big giant post-9/11 idiotball.

Yeah, I wasn't sure exactly which he was referring to, because honestly there are a lot of really bad shitty no good American wars small-scale engagements and police actions. Which really just strengthens his point, honestly.

[Brantly B.]

I started doing a long breakdown of the conflicts we've been in since 91 (and a few beforehand) and how they shook out in terms of win and loss conditions but when I got to Syria I realized I was doing something hopelessly naive. The United States is not interested in accomplishing any mission. If we actually won, then the same expectation would hold true as if we'd lost; namely that we'd go the fuck home and leave the locals alone.

The mainstream machine isn't angry that the Taliban took over; they barely give a fuck about that. They are angry that we left at all, and the fact that the Taliban took over with "surprising" swiftness just gives them some justification to complain about it.

(As the tweet before mentioned, if you stop deluding yourself about what we're actually doing for a moment, you realize that the 20-year occupation isn't embarrassing, it's impressive. Maybe it's time to just admit that we're not crappy heroes but actually very effective villains.)

[Büge]

I remember seeing people just directly comparing the newspaper comics made in the 1950s against the criticisms of BLM, and they were like 1:1. Like you said, the right hates him/BLM and calls them evil, and the centrists say shit like "I agree with your goals but disagree with your violent methods".

Yep.

[mharr]

The assumption that a fair chunk of the audience wouldn't recognise his face is a nice touch.

[Thad]

The assumption that a fair chunk of the audience wouldn't recognise his face is a nice touch.

Eh, excessively labeling things is just what political cartoonists do.



Kelly at the Onion has made a career of parodying it.

[mharr]

Labelling one thing and one thing only though? That adds metadata.

[Brantly B.]

Would a layperson have recognized Martin Luther King (Jr.)'s face during his lifetime though? It's ubiquitous today for obvious reasons, but in the mid-60s when not everybody had access to even so much as television, and the media was doing its damnedest to brush him off as just some malcontent? And how many civil rights leaders (not politicians, not actors) can you recognize as a caricature in 2021?

[Mongrel]

What interests me more about that newspaper clipping is the red pen underlining.

[Thad]

Would a layperson have recognized Martin Luther King (Jr.)'s face during his lifetime though? It's ubiquitous today for obvious reasons, but in the mid-60s when not everybody had access to even so much as television, and the media was doing its damnedest to brush him off as just some malcontent?

I don't see a date on the cartoon. If we're talking '50s, Montgomery bus boycotts, when he first began to rise to prominence, his face might not have been particularly well-known.

By '63 and the March on Washington? His face was famous by then.

[Mongrel]

That artist's style definitely looks more 60's than 50's to me, though obviously that's not exactly a carbon dating.