Adam Serwer has written an important piece that I easily could have written myself. I was struck by the examples he used, because most of them are the examples I would have used. It’s important to understand the incentives the media has, both commercial and, more indisputably legitimate, professional.
Judith Miller’s coverage of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is an excellent example. Her editors were no doubt very pleased with her for cultivating sources very close to Vice-President Cheney who were willing to speak to her both on the record and on background. It was her job to win those contacts and she succeeded at it magnificently. That those sources used her as a conduit for misinformation was an occupational risk, and burning her sources or being too openly skeptical of what they told her could have lost her her hard-won access. I’ll defend Judy Miller this far and no further. But I want to point out that there will be new reporters whose job it is to get close to Vice-President Mike Pence, and others who will want to get sources high up in the CIA and Pentagon, and others who will want to speak with Trump’s inner circle and chief of staff. These reporters will be bullshitted. They always are to some degree, but this administration will set a new land speed record for bullshit.
The media is feeling chastened no less than the Democrats. The feeling that not enough attention was paid to rural America is broadly felt, from pollsters to left-wing politicians to the editors of our major news publications and television stations. A desire not to further alienate this group of Trump-supporting citizens is growing, with some validity, and every criticism of the Trump administration will be considered through that commercial and political lens.
Serwer is also correct to point out that leaks have never been more difficult to pull off, as the government is willing to pursue leakers with real aggression and they have the tools to monitor electronic communications retroactively. Trump will probably use these tools with more zeal than even the Obama administration, and that will make getting a corrected record of what’s going on harder than ever.
There are three reasons to be hopeful about the media coverage of this president though. The first is that this administration will enter office with close to zero credibility with the press corp. This is for both cultural reasons (reasons that led virtually no newspapers to endorse Trump) and for the experience the media just went through covering the campaign. The second is that the media is still chastened from their failures during the Bush administration. So, their guilt about missing the election result and their fear of alienating Trump’s supporters will be tempered by their memory of the Iraq War and the Bush Era generally. Finally, the blogs and social media were not a force in the first term of the Bush administration, which allowed the media to operate unchallenged. That is no longer the case.
It’s true that the media is not prepared to cover this administration, but it’s also true that they’re better prepared (and we’re better prepared) than they were for Bush and Cheney.
The new media is twitter & Facebook. And the old media is going to find itself twisted into pretzels with the resurgence of BigCorp that will be unfettered by the EPA or all that they perceive has stood in the way of their needs. They will push msm with their advertising budgets, spin with their lobbyists and Rep surrogates to the point where the press will be bought off like never before. Corp bullying of the media will be normalized.
I was watching the PBS Newshour last night as they talked about the transition team and the possible shape of the Trump presidency. Christy had been demoted and Pence was named as the new head of the transition team. As I took in that plus some of the other names being mentioned, a little red light came on in the back of my head: This could very well turn into another Cheney Administration, where Pence actually runs the government in the background while Trump soaks up all the attention playing Mister President for the cameras. The parallels are frightening.
Excellent – I was thinking the same thing.
Shit. And Poppy Bush behind Reagan. I think I’m going to be sick now.
pretty clearly a while back? He’d let Pence do the governmenting stuff (for which he’s transparently unqualified) while he Made America Great Again?
Not seeing where surprise enters into this.
Yes he did. I meant to mention that in my original comment. But hearing that he named Pence to head the transition, along with other names that were mentioned, it just all kind of came together in my mind.
I think Pence telegraphed exactly that when he said his role model for vice president is Dick Cheney.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mike-pence-role-model-vice-president-dick-cheney/story?id=42170897
Yes, he actually said that.
Your third reason to be hopeful about the media coverage is blogs and social media to challenge media. But this is a mixed bag. Blogs and social media when new were independent checks on the powered elites. But then the leaders saw that it was good and figured out how to control it. Much too much of the blogosphere is a channel for the powered to distribute their message disguised under a veneer of independence. The rise of big data hasn’t helped either, since it amplifies the echo chamber on social media.
I’m not saying blogs and social media can’t be checks, just that we cant assume that they will be checks.
As long as civilian hackers stay in front of the government’s efforts to hide its machinations, they will be the real face and moving force of so-called “investigative media.” If I was Trump or any of the other Permanent Government systems, staying ahead of the hackers would be Job One. As bloated as this government has become, I doubt that it can do so.
It’s guerrilla war vs. the Redcoats/Viet Cong vs. the U.S. all over again, only on a higher plane.
So it goes…
AG
I havent seen a lot of civilian hacks in this regard so far. The campaign hacks were largely driven by Russia (state sponsored) and Assange’s desire to hurt the American Empire.
Im not sure how yhat would play into public disclosure over the next 4 years.
You write:
Please prove this. And not from the many PermaGov media-allied sites’ vacuous maunderings.
You cannot.
Was Russia in any way involved?
Probably.
Was it “largely” responsible?
I think not.
The hacker movement is “largely” populist in nature. Does that guarantee its correctness? No. Does it mean that Assange desires to “hurt the American Empire?” Maybe. With an emphasis on the word “empire.” Does that mean he desires to hurt the U.S. citizenry? To buttress the Russian empire? I don’t read it that way, myself.
Like I said…prove it.
I’m still open to proof.
But not to unfounded PermaGov-derived bullshit.
I’ve had too much of that already, and apparently so have most American voters.
AG
The hacker movement defies categorization. But there’s only so much I can say if you refuse to accept the government’s word because it’s the governments word. I move in tech circles that discuss this (though not with any special expertise I’m aware of) and what actually happened and the details since the release are consistent with past Russian practice.
Anyhow my point is, there’s no incentive for hackers to do things on their own and hackers haven’t done many things on their own so far. Maybe that will change, I don’t know.
Assange does desire to hurt the American Empire, emphasis on Empire. He makes it clear in recent interviews that he views American interventions around the world as negative and the cause of many problems. I say nothing about whether he has any negatives towards American Citizens.
My point with Assange is that his incentive has been accomplished. The politician who agreed with the Foreign Policy Consensus more than Obama is not going to get elected. I’m not sure how much he’ll care about what happens now.
You write:
Do you refuse to recognize morality as sufficient incentive for some people?
Belief?
Again…prove this allegation.
Snowden…for one example …appears to initially have been a one man operation. Until I am given proof…from a reliable, disinterested source, not from one or another of the proven-to-be-liars PermaGov mouthpieces…I remain unconvinced.
Do you disagree with this idea?
If so, why?
And if you do not, why are you so thoroughly predisposed against Assange?
AG
I have a more subtle take on when American involvement is bad around the world. Certainly I think it’s worse than the Washington Consensus thinks, but I think Assange ignores potential positives. If that’s because of his situation… well I can’t very well blame him for the ridiculous charges.
There are incentives for self-organized movements of hackers to do things on their own. The early days of Anonymous movement on 4CHAN showed that and then let the FBI plant an informant to lead them to a target that could draw indictments. For some, it was the incentive of messing with the system. For others, it was just a matter of LULZ.
Indeed, hackers haven’t done many things on their own because of the skills required. That is the primary reason that most attributions of the source of the DNC hacks was to state sponsored cyberwarfare agencies. However, that category includes the US NSA offensive capabilities.
Assange’s current opinions right now are difficult to assess because he is essentially under house arrest in the embassy of a nation relatively friendly to the US and supposedly sought for questioning by law enforcement of another nation friendly to the US on what might or might not be a honey pot sting.
By putting up information that American citizens should be allowed to see and have information about, he expects the US public to correct its government. I’m not sure how much he actually knows about Trump, but he does know that Hillary Clinton so objected to his leaking of State Department memos that there is likely and espionage indictment awaiting probable cause in the Northern District Court of Virginia (the Intelligence Community’s own). That understanding might shape one’s views of Hillary Clinton. No doubt, he thought six years ago that Collateral Murder would have triggered war crime investigations for the murder of a very visible civilian by two hyped-up attack helicopter pilots and that the State Department memos would have gotten the hyperventilating coverage that the John Podesta emails got.
In a sense, the national security establishment former leadership allying so much in unity behind Clinton could have saved us from yet another Kagan-inspired catastrophe. Not sure that Trump’s foreign policy team is better, just different and likely to walk into a contradiction of direction from their different misunderstanding of the world.
Whether he cares depends on whether he gets released from house arrest and has the chance to have due process instead of character assassination. Such an irony of the similar situation with Hillary Clinton.
You write. (Emphasis mine.):
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you really think they’ll take it that far w/the Clintons?
“Due process?”
I wonder…
I doubt it, myself.
I think they just want the Clintons to disappear from public view. If I were the Clintons at 70+ years of age, that’s what I would want as well.
AG
The closest to due process they likely will get is the Ken Starr investigation.
Please “prove” humans have landed and walked on the moon.
Please “prove” 9/11 wasn’t “an inside job” (oh, wait, IIRC, you may already be all over that one).
Please read my new sig.
You write the phrase:
“…preponderance of available factual evidence…”
Was the “…preponderance of available ‘factual’ evidence…” as presented by the media regarding the pretexts for invading Iraq “factual?”
Apparently not.
Was the “…preponderance of available “factual’ evidence…” regarding…oh, say Trump’s chances of winning the election even a number of hours after the polls opened…truly “factual?”
I dunno. Who won…big!!! I must’ve forgotten.
Werre all the articles and testimonies regarding the NSA’s denial of massive spying on U.S. citizens by reading their emails and tapping their phones “factual?”
You tell me.
How about the plentiful denials of torture of prisoners from the Bush II administration?
Were they “factual?”
Get real.
Why should I believe anything that pertains to power and its successful control of the population that is propagated by the U.S. media?
Get real.
AG
Read it. WTF is “new” about it? (You’ve said it over and over and over and over and over and over and . . . , no?)
Duh!
No! Because they did not even address what was the (actual!) preponderance of available evidence, which showed that the case for the War Crime of invading Iraq was nonsense and had disintegrated before the War Crime was launched (which is what made it a War Crime! Again, duh!).
Yes, in fact.
But then to get that you’d need to understand probabilities and their implications and the implications of assessing “Trump’s chances” from polls, with all their built-in limitations.
Er, nobody. In fact, Clinton won popular vote. (Pre-empting nonsense that that doesn’t mean anything cuz contenders would have campaigned differently otherwise: hello? anybody home? Can you say California? New York?)
P.S. Don’t expect this level of detailed rebuttal/refutation in the future. Making exception in this case, a one-off.
You mean…it’s not “big” for Trump to have a Republican Congress that will probably pass everything he wants?
Oh.
AG
Remember that awkward business with the server in Trump Tower quietly burbling messages to a server in Moscow, at Alfa Bank?:
Apparently FISA warrants are only issued regarding perceived foreign intelligence matters. Wondering who the ‘friendly foreign agencies’ were. The FBI was apparently investigating both candidates.
This is not a “hacker movement.” These are Russian hackers with a definite agenda. And it comes from the Kremlin. These people are known, they have left footprints before.
These aren’t teenagers fucking around with Bill Gates. These are state actors.
Positive attribution of cyberattacks still seems to be a quite inexact art. The MO is similar to known previous attacks, but the attribution to Russia depends on assuming that (1) only a state actor has the capability to carry out the attack and (2) the state actor has an obvious motive for the attack.
Russian officials have trolled the fact that they helped out Wikileaks.
State actors can also include rogue intelligence community personnel as well. If agencies can politically leak they can also politically hack.
“Who cares?”
Serious Answer: many of us, but none of them.
They have their own media. Ours is broken and looks like the New York Times and MSNBC. Their is functional and looks like Breitbart and church bulletins. When you ask, “How Will the Media Cover Trump?” you’re really asking, “How Will Our Media Cover Trump?”
You’re referring to the ostensibly fact-based, ostensibly unbiased, establishment corporate media. That’s our media. We at the pond might hate much of it, but the fact is, that’s where Blue America gets the vast majority of our misinformation. None of it matters to Red America. The NYT, the WaPo, our weird aversion to sexual assault and Islamophobia and gay-bashing and antisemitism and racism and racism and racism. Our stupid ideas about norms. Our whining about tax returns and treaties. None of that matters to Red America. They have their websites, their churches, their TV stations, their talk radio.
And us? We’re happy with our media. We didn’t punish them after the Bush years, for egregious errors. We kvetched a little, then snuggled into their laps. We didn’t attach any price to media failure–any more than we attached a price to torture or extra-legal assassination or historic levels of deportation–so we as a party and as a demographic own them.
The only thing that make sense is for ‘our’ media to embrace partisanship. We can stop patronizing the right-wing media now. We can stop feeling like it’s only fair to aim for unbiased reporting. They’re not rubes and yokels; they are better at this than we are. They’re not the underdogs. We need our media, the establishment media, to follow something like the (ostensible) Fox creed: don’t seek balance within your product, seek balance against the reactionary misinformation in which the country is suffocating.
Only one problem. We don’t own them. They are owned and operated by incompetent elites working for greedy ones, with just enough competence to give us a feeling of smug superiority.
More serious questions:
And how do we make the answer to 1 look more like the answer to 3?
You write:
Precisely.
Thank you, Steggies.
AG
I’m scratching my head here trying to figure out how we are supposed to “punish” the media or “attach a price” to their failure.
Stop believing what they say.
Stop consuming their lies.
Stop supporting the people and policies that they support.
Become aware of how the media fixes work. On every level.
Stop patronizing their advertisers.
Use social media to spread the word(s).
Just for starters.
ASG
Good list. But what else is new? We’ve all been doing these things for years. And newspapers and even cable have lost a lot of their audience. And I still read The Times, because, like Pravda, they provide a lot of information, some of which might turn out to be true, and the rest of which you can see how they WANT you to think, which is a pretty good clue to the truth.
For example, I read an article in the business section today about how most people just pay the minimum due on their monthly credit card bill and by doing that wind up paying interest forever, and that those who could pay more really ought to do so.
That told me a lot. What they were actually saying is not rocket science, I think most people know that. I also know that most people pay the minimum because that’s all they can afford, and that’s how the banks make the most money on exorbitant interest. Therefore THE FACT that they’re printing this now tells me that the banks really need cash. They’d rather be paid more now and make less on interest.
You’re a consumer. Write often to point out failures, biases, errors, etc.
Link has media e-mail addresses
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/email-address-of-journalists-news-editors-tv-anchors-web-report
ers/1352/
Amen.
Economics will be interesting.
If Trump implements the following:
The deficit will explode. Of course, to a Keynesian like me this is a GOOD thing.
This is an irony I will predict NO ONE will notice – but Trump is better IF he does the above in the short term on economy than Clinton.
Not questioning your assumption Trump will propose/attempt this.
Questioning your assertion that (even to a Keynesian, necessarily) it’s “a good thing”.
Virtually all liberal economists I know are for increased fiscal stimulus.
The demand for output can be decomposed as Y = C + I + G where:
Y is total demand
C is consumer demand
I is investment
G is government spending
C is a function of wages and the tax rate
If total demand (Y) is insufficient to employ all those who want a job, the goal is to increase it.
C can be written as a function of wage growth and the tax rate. A lower tax rate increases C. In addition direct spending increases through G also increase demand.
This is basic Keynsian theory.
Liberals would propose increased infrastructure spending and targeting tax cuts at the lower income scale.
I would rather build bridges, but increased defense spending creates jobs. I would rather have cuts targeted at the lower income scale, but tax cuts will create increased demand.
will create increased demand”, though I don’t just question, but absolutely deny (along with essentially all economists, including cons like Mankiw), that this increased demand will balance/exceed the foregone government revenue (i.e., wingnut dogma that “tax cuts increase revenues”), and thereby reduce deficits. That’s a perennial zombie lie.
2) (my point): there is NO reason . . . none whatsoever . . . that “G” need include increased “defense” spending (duh! “infrastructure”, as you seemed to recognize).
Increased stimulus is indeed Keynesian.
That it must include increased “defense” spending is not.
No way, no how.
Yes, this.
The practical effects of increased defense spending in the current world situation is to create waste of resources either tied up in unused inventory or in active destruction of the global infrastructure somewhere in the world,
The practical effects of well-thought-out infrastructure are to lower the cost of doing business for all private sector transactions. The current healthcare infrastructure by being privatized costs business twice as much as it would if it were public infrastructure that put all risk into a single pool or managed the costs of actual care by socializing it into a national health service.
The key factor in what is infrastructure is what do you want everyone in the economy to have without rationing by ability to pay. Rationing then occurs by political decisions, which has its own problems if there is not sufficient oversight. Where other countries find difficulties with public health care infrastructures is where they interface with private vendors or service providers. Monopolies, cartels, and other imperfect competition has increased costs even in countries with the lowest health care costs per patient and highest patient outcomes.
The same is true of transportation. Most highway departments were much better run when they did not contract out construction but maintained their own construction crews.
but this seems exactly, succinctly right, getting right to the crux:
Keynes didn’t actually care all that much what your built. It was military spending after all that finally ended the Great Depression.
It certainly makes more sense to build infrastructure than fighter planes, but both create jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
The reaction to what I posted was what I expected: people are going to have difficulty processing that Trump will act as a fiscal Keynesian. He would deny it, and the Republicans will deny it.
Reagan denied it.
That doesn’t mean it it ins’t true.
things I haven’t said.
Trump promises to make infrastructure a major focus
Trump’s plan won’t be revenue neutral.
It’s the only good thing about it.
with things I haven’t said.
That happens a lot around here.
The Modern Monetary Theory of economics uses an equation that is a transformation of that one of actual realized supply and demand.
G − T = S − I − NX
G is government spending
T is government taxes
S is savings
I is investment
NX is net exports.
Or government debt = net private savings – net exports
But this runs up against the accounting conventions of individual institutions, creating winners and losers within each cycle. And forcing the increase on the righthand side and unsuccessfully trying to reduce the lefthand side.
Both this equation and the equation of aggregate demand state relationships; they do not specify policies.
The liberal economists looking at the present economy are for increased fiscal stimulus. The critical question is how much stimulus before inflation.
The MMT economist says that you take the bite out of inflation by increasing taxes to take the money out of the economy.
Which comes to the point. Will Trump delegitimize Grover Norquist and his insane tax pledge?
We don’t have our media because we don’t have the billionaire’s resources to go mass market.
Even the mass market media (called the mainstream media, but really the Wall Street media) with all their resources don’t have the market share of even 20 years ago.
The end of FCC restrictions on ownership, the rise of the internet, the right-wing contempt that ended the fairness doctrine, the disappearance of the liberal consensus of TV’s Golden Age, the curtailment of public funding of public broadcasting, the growth of institutional private advertising on all media all did in the media that I grew up seeing. And now we have narrowcasted competing echo chambers with not overlap of audience broadcasting essentially separate realities, and a Post-Modern philosophy of of not legitimized truth (or truth as socially constructed) being used to excuse outright lying. (How do you know it’s lying, Smartypants?)
Most serious question:
In 2016 and going forward how do you find out what is actually going on in the world? Who is any longer committed to a truth that transcends special interests? (Who ever did?)
The traditional Enlightenment idea was that a contention of ideas that granted some sort of objective standard of truth created that social consensus of what was true. But then it was English gentlemen who did the contending and judging and the context of their interest was a background unstated assumption.
In almost every field, contention of ideas has some sort of class implications either to interests or as symbols that polite debate is less possible. We are approaching an information environment like that of the early Church councils in which random highwayman assassinations were strategically used to alter the information of theological debate. Or of the religious warfare of the Reformation with its enclosed worldviews. In fact, that Reformation worldview is what the militant religioous right claims that they are about over against urbane Enlightenment.
We don’t have an “our” media. Period. Except at multiple places like the Frog Pond that in turn depend on increasingly more diverse and less well vetted sources of primary reporting on events. And environment that has the militaries of all nations that can afford it (especially the US) scheming various strategies of information war. Permanent war propaganda all the time.
It is up to us to do persuasion without the advantage of a legitimized media, which is the situation we discovered in shock at the Thanksgivings of two decades ago after Rush Limbaugh and FoxNews transformed rural America.
My wife once made a well developed argument that politics was a battle of the reformation versus the enlightenment.
Social conservatives are children of the reformation.
Social liberals are children of the enlightenment.
The reformation gave rise to the idea of individual liberty since it focused on one’s personal relationship with God.
But the idea of liberty for children of the reformation is always tied to the furtherance of God. Children of the enlightenment recognize no such idea behind their justification of liberty.
The two movements are historically connected. But their ideas differ, and are reflected in the media that each consumes.
I can’t replicate all of the argument – my wife is smarter than I am by miles.
The Enlightenment got tired of the Reformation’s endless wars and sought to find a way to peace through free-thinking secret societies and open debate. And then science in the 17th and 18th century sense.
While the most remembered Founding Fathers tended to be Deists and advocates of the Englightenment, there were others who were clearly advocates of the Reformation. And of course Reformation Puritan New England gave way to Enlighenment transcendalism, which for 150 years was considered America’s distinctive contribution to Western Civilization and the source of much utopian and liberal thought.
Modernity and method have challenged both of these traditions. We are back at the point of endless cultural war that the Enlightenment sought to end. But instead of Christian ecumenism under debate, it is now religious ecumenism of the broadest sort.
Wise person your wife. Athens and Sparta also. When I read Plato’s Republic I thought to myself, “I’ll bet Hitler read this.”
This election was also a big FU to the media and their owners and operators the: “incompetent elites working for greedy ones”. I really don’t see them learning anything from this. I expect them to be as spineless as they’ve been for the past 30 years and to keep feeding the masses drivel.
Did anyone get purged from the Sunday shows? Do you really expect there will any significant changes? These people all make way too much money to rock the boat.
There is a fundamental error in history here. The right wing always believed the media and think tanks leaned left, and purposely distorted facts and research to promote a left wing viewpoint. So when they started funding their own think tanks and media, they made sure “facts” and research always supported the conservative view. They rigged their institutions because they mistakenly believed that’s what institutions like Brookings and media like the NYT had been doing all along, rigging things to support liberal dogma.
They never thought “fact-based” was anything but propaganda. This is why they reject science, among other things. They assume it’s slanted to achieve some nefarious political goal, and that the “scientific method” is double-talk for left wing persuasion.
They do not believe in an objective reality. And if we respond in a political, nonfactual way, we are simply duplicating their original mistake.
The media will get on board the Trump Train completely and utterly. Any ‘real’ journalism will be considered impolite and the product of DFH’s. Progressive voices like Maddow and Hayes will be quickly shoved to the margins. Chris Matthews will be sucking Trump’s cock within a month. ‘Entitlement’ reform (destruction) will be considered the only viable alternative. Voter suppression will be considered legitimate election spoils.
This is because republicans, of every stripe, are considered by the media as the only adults in the country. IOKIYAR. Period.
Then, after all the damage is done, after voters are suppressed, after abortion is illegal, after the ACA is repealed, after war, after the Trump family has enriched themselves ten times over, and after the media itself is castrated, they will be shocked, shocked, that Trump is unpopular.
.
You write:
Indeed!!!
A further look at this idea, only in the present/near past rather than the future:
Thank you and good night.
AG
This is rhetoric, not analysis.
More properly polemic.
Media strike.
WTFU
And we have our answer
.
Well, there will be more than one answer to the question. The media enters the Trump Administration in opposition to his rhetoric and his policy plans, such as they are, but the discussions throughout this thread are real as well. He is the President, so a normalization of him and his agenda is difficult to avoid. And the media does have multiple imperatives to maintain access to Adminstration figures, and that is difficult to avoid as well.
But holy fuck, that equivalency at your link is very discouraging. Both Sides Do It turrrned up to eleventybillionthirty.
They’ll do it the same way they’ve always done it over the last 30 years, with a both siderist slant. Trump will get his grief, but it will be leavened with a healthy dose of a pox on both houses.
A deserved dose of a pox on both houses, for whatever reasons.
AG
What is increasingly clear as the secret state closes is that we will not even have clear primary historical records by which to juge how and where decision-makers went astray except through selective and possibly random leaks like those that Wikileaks has been collecting.
Can Wikileaks be played? If they are not careful about provenance and data integrity, of course they can?
Is Wikileaks biased? Well if you essentially provide the context for holding someone under extrajudicial house arrest for you agency’s failure to properly secure its data, yes I can see there might be some axes to grind there. Why is it that Collateral Murder is less important to the US media than Weiner’s self-pix and John Podesta’s private banter with his buddies and Clinton campaign staff?
They’ll cover it the same way as always. Just heard (on the radio) CNN’s correspondent describing Clinton’s conference call to her top donors. Clinton put strong blame on Comey’s letters about the emails found, according to the CNN person, on “Huma Abedin’s laptop” and not Anthony Weiner’s laptop. CNN still can’t get the story straight.
The media is lazy, the people are complacent, and Trump is a functional moron.
I’m rooting for PA and MI to follow WI into the abyss. They deserve what happens to them.
Wait until high tech crashes. If you truly live in Los Gatos, you’ll get a taste of what these other states have experienced and are still trying to cope with.
Just keep waiting.
The future is always high tech. Every sector has its ups and downs but tech is not oil, it never goes backward.
High tech was electrical power generation,ground transportation, wired communication in the late 19th early 20th century. Then it was wireless communication (radio/television), air transport and space. Then computers and emerging is bioscience.
Silicon Valley has participated in every wave since the 1920’s. Companies have come and gone while all sorts of things from the shuttle tiles, laser printers, iPhones, social media, etc have been invented or perfected by companies here.
I’m rooting for the past to die.
Don’t think you’re being smart by rooting against the future.
Forgot about semiconductors, microprocessors, etc.
Silicon Valley will never be Detroit or the oil patch as long as the people and companies look to the future and the spirit of innovation isn’t tied to just one industry.
My neighbor is CFO for the company that invented these – just a couple of years ago.
http://www.target.com/p/butterfly-s-m-28ct/-/A-14766002?sid=2238S&ref=tgt_adv_XS000000&AFID=
google_pla_df&CPNG=PLA_Health+Beauty+Shopping_Local&adgroup=SC_Health+Beauty&LID=7000000
01170770pgs&network=g&device=m&location=9032142&gclid=CKiKy4LJptACFQgIaQodIEwFVQ&
;gclsrc=aw.ds
All kinds of odd, innovative stuff going here, not just Google, Facebook, and Apple.
I have very strong ties to the area. And we’ll leave it at that.
Well written and is true not only for Republican administrations. Getting close to insiders will result in less critical thinking and writing.
An article which explains why bloggers missed this election result and were as caught off guard as the msm and Clintons themselves.
So true, same for any form of negotiations or discussions in business and corporate life too.
I would be surprised if the professional class that runs our media end up very much in the Democrats corner. The key word is “professional”, which means that they value money more than anything and the large corporations they work for are going to be focused on trying to advantage themselves of as much deregulation from the Trump administration and congress as they can get their greedy little monopolistic hands on.
At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get into situation similar to Russia before Putin- i.e. the various oligarchs battle it out for power amid the chaos of a failed state. In this case, it could very well be a fractious party and inept, ideological, and/or corrupt administrators. Trump did come out against the Time Warner/ATT merger, which was a good populist stand to take, but will he stick to it? My guess is that money talks.
In fact, that defames many “professionals” (including me! Though that’s not the main point). You think all “professionals” work for “large corporations”?
Wow.
I was talking about the MEDIA professional class.
Ahhh… let’s see:
CBS: Viacom (20 Billion)
NBC: Comcast (150 Billion)
ABC: Disney (150 Billion)
CNN: Time Warner (60 Billion)
FOX: (50 Billion)
Yup. Big businesses that could use a few favors from the Trump administration.
At our local Stronger Together meeting yesterday we discussed that one of our jobs going forward is to keep a close eye on the local media. We need to support and encourage any who are doing actual journalism, and call out any that are not. If a million people called and complained each time CNN twisted a story, they might pay attention.
I’m saying a variation of this in all contexts: it’s extremely important that we not let Trump’s election be perceived as a liberal failure.
We’re in this mess because of American conservatism, full stop. It’s their nominee; their misinformation process; their dishonesty; their FBI.
All the arguments about how they brought this on themselves aren’t invalidated by his victory; they’re strengthened.
As Digby has been saying, all this “Oh, we fucked up; we need to pay more attention to white rural men” is just totally backwards. It’s by catering to them that we as a nation got here.
I have no problem with paying attention to the economic interests of those living in Rust Belt states. Obama bailed out the auto industry and won both Michigan and Ohio despite being black.
These people are really hurting. What they saw in Clinton was a wealthy establishment politician with plenty of obvious connections to Goldman Sachs etc. Never mind that Trump is from much the same wealthy NYC community, but his language and rage match theirs. Bernie inspired these same people without resorting to racism or hatred because he focused on the economic needs of those in states left behind. So, it can be done.
What we shouldn’t bow to are the racism, intolerance, bigotry, crudity, religious fanaticism, penchant for violence, etc.
Right but the idea that “paying attention to the economic interests of the rust belt states” equals “Trump was right, Clinton wrong” is what I’m complaining about.
The idea that those people are going to be better off under Trump than they would have been under Clinton is, as you and I both know, laughable. The messaging isn’t the point; the policies are the point.
Liberalism suffered a tactical failure, not an ideological one.
I don’t know if it wasn’t an ideological failure.
Politics is emotional aspirational and inspirational. In that respect at least, HRC was a terrible messenger.
The moment you say “messenger” you’re denying it’s an ideological failure and agreeing with me it’s a tactical failure.
I agree with you that it was a tactical failure, but it could also be an ideological failure. Im not sure yet.
obvious, it’s a mystery to me why it could even need stating:
Then you’re in denial. What just happened was absolutely a liberal failure of cosmic proportions.
The so-called conservatives are a given. They were a royal pain in the ass, but they weren’t exactly a surprise. The GOP was eating its own. Trump slaughtered the rest of them, but he was a terrible candidate.
What did the Democrats do at this absolutely crucial moment for the country and the world? They nominated probably the only contender that couldn’t have beaten by any of those 17 dimwits, and apparently never even considered the possibility.
What you can blame the Republicans for is deliberately deadlocking congress and relentlessly brainwashing the hinterlands.
But we have had years to see how this operates. Many Democrats understood how to break through. Sanders actually did it. So did Warren.
Yes, looking at the Republicans, you’re right, “they brought this on themselves.” Brought what? A huge Republican sweep is what. True, sooner or later many of the Trump voters will regret it, but the damage is done, with a lot more damage to come.
I particular disagree with your closing sentence. It’s not by catering to the WWC that we got here. Obamacare catered to the WWC, among others. Is it appreciated? I bet you it’s more appreciated than we hear about. But a lot more catering needed to be done. Their own representatives prevented a lot of that; but most of it was not even comntemplated except by Warren and Sanders and Democrats of that stripe.
None of this is specially catering to the WWC. It’s more easily understood as the working class in general, people who are struggling. Free state college tuition, for example — is that catering to the WWC? Or is it something that would benefit American society, including them?
It was too late. They didn’t trust the Democratic Party, and I’m not sure they should have. Our candidate was DOA with these people, and we should have known that from the beginning.
The easiest way to understand it is that some Trump people voted for Trump, but that wouldn’t have won it for him without the others who voted AGAINST Hillary because they thought Trump couldn’t be worse.
If you want to know what I’m talking about, read Thomas Frank.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19618/listen-leftist-thomas-frank-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-berni
e-sanders
Respectfully, you’re not hearing me.
I’m distinguishing between two questions — the policies, appointments and governance that would be delivered by the two tickets, and who won the election.
These are not the same question: asking why Democrats lost is about campaign failures and messaging failures, not policy failures or some kind of philosophical mistake.
OK, I see what you’re saying. I didn’t make this distinction — but the reason I didn’t is that I don’t think it’s as much of a distinction as you make out. The campaign failures and messaging failures stem directly from the fact that the policy or philosophy of the Democrats became disengaged from what the party actually did or how it came over to people who weren’t already committed to it.
And the Democratic establishment remained sanctimonious about this philosophy and unaware of the real conditions in the country, and how their own interests went counter to this philosophy instead of translating it into real gains for the masses — because they confused the philosophy with reality. This type of doublethink goes right back to the DNC and early Bill Clinton administration when they decided the working class was a drag on the party, and has gotten worse and worse since then, due to a combination of GOP intransigence and Democratic tone-deafness. I’m not suggesting that the Democrats should have done what the GOP wanted them to do, but that the Democrats needed to deal in an effective way with the real conditions that made, and continue to make, GOP messaging successful.
I would urge you to go back and read that interview with Thomas Frank, because he explains this better than I could. To put it simply, the philosophy of the Democratic Party is irrelevant if it doesn’t translate into terms people actually see in their own lives, or if they can’t see how it does. Whatever the reasons for this may be. After a while they stop listening.
I’m speaking in general terms here. Obviously you won’t get through to everybody and you won’t convince everybody. But the margins that win elections are often very small, and rarely very big, even nationally.
I’ll leave you with this from Frank Bruni’s op-ed in today’s Times, “The Democrats Screwed Up” :
“Democrats need to … move past a complacency for which the Clintons bear considerable blame.
“It’s hard to overestimate the couple’s stranglehold on the party — its think tanks, its operatives, its donors — for the last two decades. Most top Democrats had vested interests in the Clintons, and energy that went into supporting and defending them didn’t go into fresh ideas and fresh faces, who were shut out as the party cleared the decks anew for Hillary in 2016.
“In thrall to the Clintons, Democrats ignored the copious, glaring signs of an electorate hankering for something new and different and instead took a next-in-line approach that stopped working awhile back. Just ask Mitt Romney and John McCain and John Kerry and Al Gore and Bob Dole. They’re the five major-party nominees before her who lost, and each was someone who, like her, was more due than dazzling.
“After Election Day, one Clinton-weary Democratic insider told me: ‘I’m obviously not happy and I hate to admit this, but a part of me feels liberated. If she’d won, we’d already be talking about Chelsea’s first campaign. Now we can do what we really need to and start over.'”
I don’t agree with many of Bruni’s other points in this piece, but this is spot on.
I grew up in Ks. Thomas Frank lived on the mean streets of Johnson County in one of wealthiest regions of the country. If any of my uncles met him they would call him a froufrou.
His KS book didn’t talk about the deep racism in KS. It was just an afterthought when he was discussing the divide and conquer strategy the right employs to get people to vote against their economic interests. The fact that he was unable to give racism it’s due, seriously undermined the nuggets of worthwhile information.
People on the coasts and the media in general conflate geographic location with authenticity and ignore class and distance. Many Midwestern and Southern “down home experts” come from extremely well off families. They know as much about the common people from their home or home of decades past as Sally Quinn or Maureen Dowd know about the underclass of D.C.
I never read the Kansas book, but have heard criticisms like that. But WTMWK came out 12 years ago. The interview I linked was in connection with his new book, Listen Liberal. I was very impressed by his insights in the interview; I haven’t read this book either.
Just as you say, people from a particular place don’t necessarily know much if anything about other kinds of people from that place. But on the other hand, I think sometimes even people from other areas can recognize some commonalities if they suffer the same problems.
Having grown up in Brooklyn (exactly one mile from Bernie Sanders), I can’t say I’m familiar with Kansas. But here he wasn’t talking about Kansas, really. He was talking about the Democratic Party and why so many working class people don’t identify with it any more. I come from a working class family that has always been Democratic. To me, Sanders is a real Democrat, probably the most nationally respected Democrat — but he’s not actualy a member of the party. To me that is perfectly logical. And the Clintons not only are in the party, they practically ARE the party. Or were, let’s hope. So I have that much in common. There’s still a lot of people like that even in New York. Some of them are racist, most are not.
You liked what Maha said there, so did I.
I read it over the Summer, if it is the same piece that came out about the time of the Democratic Convention. If I remember correctly, he doubled down on WWC which as I stated he knows virtually nothing. He grew up in Mission Hills. He went to KU, UVA, and U. of Chicago. I have personally never met anyone that attended any one of those schools that wasn’t a reactionary. He admits to being a conservative, and I still think he is in reality. He is somewhat rational, so he can fake being a liberal.
If you don’t realize that POC make up a large portion of the working class, and refuse to factor racism and racial resentment as barriers for WWC to identity with the Democratic Party, I fail to see how you are offering a real solution that can possibly work. When a doctor misdiagnoses a patient, the odds are low the prescription will be beneficial. Sure by blind luck it might work, but why waste your time and money? It is just as likely to cause more and possibly greater problems.
Bernie Sanders is not helping either. A politician that is trying to repackage the New Deal without addressing why it stalled and was eventually rolled back, hint: Nixon’s Southern Strategy, is selling as much snake oil as Trump. I liked Sanders up until about 18 months ago, before I ever heard him speak for more than ten minutes. He is very unimpressive as a leader, because he does nothing but whine, complain, and offer unicorn porn solutions that are impossible without a voting bloc like the Solid South of old.
You would never have known that Barack Obama has been president the past 8 years. “Obama’s 39 percent showing among white voters matched the percentage that Bill Clinton received in 1992 — albeit it in a competitive three-way race — and exceeded the percentage of the white vote earned by Walter Mondale in 1984, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George McGovern in 1972.”
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2012/11/08/president-obama-and-the-white-vote-no-prob
lem
Sorry, but you’re just barking as far as I’m concerned.
As far as Sanders, you’re entitled to your opinion, but
that’s all it is, your opinion.
So explain the Frank thesis of how an agnostic Jewish person with a Brooklyn accent gets more of the white vote. I am sure in JOCO, their anti-Semitism was not out in the open, but in the boonies it is. Tom Watson KC’s most illustrious golfer quit his lifetime golf club in the 1990s, because they still wouldn’t allow Jewish members. I don’t see how the votes he gains are not offset by fears of a Socialist. He did not do well with LATINX over 34, and old white people. You are trading a group that is unreliable for showing up for one that always does. I doubt my parents would not have voted for him
In addition, Obama got 43% in ’08 and 39% in ’12. Trump ran a more explicit race baiting campaign. If you know the Atwater equation for winning the white vote=Ni**>Busing>Taxes, while Romney and McCain ran the taxes modern day dog whistle, Trump reverted back to the equivalency of busing. Obama may not have won if McCain or Romney had run the Full Monty.
Could Sanders have won? Sure, but he did nothing in the primaries that showed it. He wasn’t disciplined enough to go after the POC that he had to have. He didn’t build an organization that could do anything more than stage large rallies. They didn’t train their volunteers well. He had tons of money and blew through it. In the bigger primaries he had his biggest loses, and he got 3 million less votes. I don’t know, but that doesn’t seem like a great recipe for success
When any given person runs in an election, a lot of people don’t vote for him. If he wins, it’s because more people voted for him — but plenty of people didn’t. So the people or the kinds of people you mention wouldn’t vote for him. All that’s needed is that enough people do vote for him.
Could Sanders have won? I believe so, but I can’t prove it. Nobody can prove it, and nobody can disprove it. He is an anti-establishment candidate, he got a lot of people excited. Not you, of ocurse, but a lot of people. It’s plausible that he could have won, even you admit that. Beyond that, we could be arguing forever and there’s no way to prove it.
He was a much stronger candidate than Hillary, that’s for sure. And I don’t believe Trump so much won this election, as Hillary lost it.
I’m not buying your last paragraph. I don’t know where you get that stuff. He was beaten by the Clinton machine, that’s obvious. I csn’t help it if you don’t care for him, a lot of people do. He’s got the highest favorables of any popular politician in the country, and he’s the most popular senator in the country. But have it your way.
He has high favorables, because he was not on the ballot. He is the most liked (if that is even true), because the MSM has not fun house mirrored him into a clownish version of his real self. You have proven in this exchange to only accept information that confirms your already preconceived worldview, any new new information that calls it into question is easily discarded.
I actually talked to voters. I knocked on thousands of doors and made hundreds of phone calls. I met people that loved Sanders and met more that were scared of him. I met Clinton, Trump, Johnson, Stein, and McMullen voters. I met people too beat down or too ignorant to make a choice. What did you do?
” … the MSM has not fun house mirrored him into a clownish version of his real self.”
Well, they tried their best. Seems to have worked on you.
But since that wasn’t so easy, they concentrated on fun house mirroring and making clownish versions of his supporters. The Clinton campaign was very big into that. They had a field day with Trump, of course. You see what it got them.
Bernie Sanders was on the ballot in every state in the union. He’s an incomparably better campaigner than Hillary Clinton. Every single poll taken showed him doing far better against any Republican opponent than Clinton.
When you talked to these voters and made hundreds of phone calls, on whose behalf were you doing it?
What did I do? I supported Bernie Sanders, and so did my wife and three children.
Like I said, I never expected everybody to vote for Sanders. That wasn’t required. Maybe he wouldn’t have won Kansas.
Oh, and then there’s Maha.
http://www.mahablog.com/2016/11/12/dear-sister-and-brother-progressives/
That was pretty good.
Really good.
Josh Marshall has an interesting take on the impact of the election on the media. Many are large corporations and dependent on federal governmental decisions. Small media outlets cannot afford lawsuit. This will get even worse if Trump changes the libel laws as he has said he would
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/keep-a-close-eye-on-the-msm
eventually getting around to telling the truth of what it was all about (podcast, 5:55; may quote relevant parts below if/when they’ve posted transcript; then again, may not!).
[Audio continues, but missing from transcript, as I’ve now pointed out to both program contact and ombudsman; (my transcription from audio):]
Guess may as well celebrate even such a relatively tiny and inconsequential victory these days.
Jesus Christ. That guy is very worried about the debt, and doesn’t understand that the Trump budget proposals will put us into $ billions in annual deficits.
The voters’ collective civic education is terrible. It’s a real problem.
a truck (in the form of a deplorable racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, fascistic, authoritarian demagogue) could . . . and did! . . . drive through.
Reminds me of another of these voter interviews NPR’s been playing, this one of a Trumper, thrilled that Trump won, who averred as to how he liked his Medicaid (via Obamacare expansion) and was kinda worried at the prospect of losing it . . . but boy did he hate Obamacare and approve of Trump/GOPers’ plans to “repeal” it!
People can be such self-defeating idiots!
“It’s true that the media is not prepared to cover this administration, but it’s also true that they’re better prepared (and we’re better prepared) than they were for Bush and Cheney.”
This is my first time posting and formatting doesn’t seem to be working. I can’t use bold or any of the functions, so I’m referring to “we’re better prepared” section.
Are we? I don’t know what you read but here, LG&M, Digby, MJ, Nation, DK, etc. have all sublimated the failings of the Obama administration. The Democrats have never figured out how to get the corporate media to quit constantly putting their thumbs on the scale. Not sure they really want to, because so many benefit from the current system. Until that is addressed, the Dems will only win as a reaction to Republican overeach and failure. In addition, the head of the national ticket will have to be the charismatic politician of their generation, because Democrats can’t vote for a decent center-left Presidential candidates like Humphrey, Gore, or Hillary, because they didn’t get the Chris Matthews thrill in the nether regions.
There are numerous failings that need to be addressed on so many different levels, but so many of us want to pretend that they speak for the true majority. I have read fladem, tarheeldem, MNPundit, and dataguy, and each one seems to think he speaks to the missing white voter. I have lived all over the country in the Midwest and South predominantly on construction and landscaping crews, farms, and the restaurant service industry. I have worked for the DNC (extremely low level) and volunteered numerous times for both Clintons, Dean, Kerry, and Obama campaigns on the local level. I am a deplorable (uneducated, white, cis male) according to most DK members. I feel like by my actions, I’m a Democrat by default, because in my heart I feel like a Moderate Marxist. I am not so presumptuous as to speak for anyone other than myself.
There needs to be a grieving process and many need to shed outdated and unworkable maxims. So many of us got this whole campaign wrong, maybe not horribly but ultimately wrong according to the archaic rules of the Electoral College. Before the election, I tried to warn people that had some historical knowledge, this would be a mashup of 1968 US election, 1860 US election, and 1932-33 German elections and events. I worried about violence at the conventions that did not really come to fruition. So I wondered if my concerns about a razor thin election were foolish. In hindsight, Clinton got approximately 5% more than HHH, and the Nixon/Wallace zombie got about 12 pts. less. Maybe this is closer to the 1856 than 1860 and Trump is our Buchanan. This feels like the end of Reconstruction. Not sure why the Democrats never try to fix the the EC or at least get some concessions like the Compromise of 1877. Clinton won my precinct by 40 pts., my county by 30 pts, my state by 5 pts, and my country by 1-2 pts most likely. Not sure how to deal with the dissonance so soon after Gore with results most likely so much more catastrophic. We are watching 2 centuries of Constitutional norms crumble before our eyes with more likely to over the next four years.
How many times were FDR and LBJ and MLK and JFK and RFK and… referred to in convention and campaign speeches? Maybe I missed something. The ideological rejection of the history of the Democratic Party is the abject failure that has led to this pass. Instead, the emphasis lay on strategy and tactics instead of content; there were algorithms, internet, identity fetishes. If we are one people why do we need to be carved up and delivered in neatly ornamented packages of different characteristics. We are one people or we not. Bernie Sanders proved beyond doubt that the right way to go is to follow the strait path. The massive, enthusiastic crowds he drew were the writing on the wall. But the super slick Clinton crowd would have none of it. It was not glitzy, glamorous enough, maybe uncool. So they let themselves be outdone by a reality star who knew the media ropes better and will soon be president. Somewhere I recall Chelsea Clinton saying she was happy that she belonged to a media savvy family. You have to love the farcical arrogance of the Democrats.
This is really bad. Are you one of those Bernie supporters that only know the comic book version of American and Democratic Party history, because your post reads very much like that is the extent of your knowledge.
Please explain further. Vanquish my ignorance.
I know Sanders supporters that followed him around like the Grateful Dead. They could not be bothered to do actual GOTV for him. I also wonder how many of his voters were Trump ratf**kers, after the results of the Primaries and the GE are now known. Bernie ran the typical Anybody But Clinton (the front runner) campaign, but because of Internet fundraising was able to last much longer than the not going to be the nominees of the past.
In terms of the DNC Convention, I watched on CSPAN, so I saw short bits on all those candidates and even Truman. The bits about Bill Clinton were treated like ancient history by the funky fun bunch on MSNBC, when I watched on DVR later. In terms of campaign speeches, you could be right, but I never saw more than 5 minutes of one except on rare occasions. They always had to show an empty lectern awaiting Trump. Then I was done with cable news for the day and worked in the yard or around the house.
I would have liked to seen more discussion of the Fair Deal and the Great Society by all Democrats but talking to undecided voters not sure it would have mattered. They had trouble with anything before the W. Bush years.
The stuff on the over reliance on data and the new techno nerd elites was spot on. If I never hear from David Plouffe or Steve Schale again, I will find some solace.