Wednesday, August 10, 2016

All media is in deep crisis and Trump is responsible

Trump's remarks yesterday when speaking about what will happen with the Supreme Court if he is not elected had the effect of shoving the entire media over the edge into irrationality, and that is world-wide media not just American national and local media. This is a blanket condemnation on all media. They always were nearly useless on covering political matters, now it's official, not a single one can be trusted to deliver objective facts about anything.

They are as toddlers tossing their toys and teething implements out of their cribs.

We all saw and heard the same rally. Admittedly, Trump's delivery is disjointed. He does skip back and forth between points of a subject as people do conversationally. That specific moment foremost he was talking about the makeup of the Supreme Court. This is familiar territory well internalized by everyone paying attention. Each point that Trump makes is stated at every rally, there is very little difference between them. Trump reiterates that 2A will be a thing of the past under Hillary Clinton, because of her obsession and because of the Supreme Court.  Trump reiterates the support he's received from NRA. There are several crucial points that Trump makes at each rally, he states them as they occur while he is speaking from outline, he will interject, "They backed me early. That's never happened before," then continue with his main points, there are key elements he tosses into the middle of larger points. His followers do not see this as confusing. It's not confusing. It's all quite easy to follow. It needn't be delivered in order. This is how people really do speak, asides, sprinkled in, however with Trump a bit excessively as if sprinkling salt with a Trump aside-shaker all over his speeches. It's spicy. It's entertaining. His crowd loves hearing the same points repeated rally to rally. They go there physically to hear it again, to be near the man making them.  This drives critics nuts because they prefer clean straightforward text point to point, so their outlines are provided them cleanly. Trump does not wander, but appears loath to complete a repeated thought without allowing intrusive side points. His crowd accepts all this as normal human speech. We really do speak to each other this way. His critics and detractors despise Trump's manner of speaking and claim it proof of an addled mind. It is no such thing. Trump actually speaks directly to people, he speaks to the crowds as if they are an individual person in the same living room being spoken to intimately.

The problem is they're imagining that viewers don't have eyes and ears of their own and are incapable of comprehending what they saw and heard for themselves. Their interpretation is useless. 100% useless. All of them, across the board. Worse than that, damaging. Not a single reporter is capable of getting it right. One after the other no matter who is speaking, no matter the network, no matter the channel, each reporter delivers the same ridiculous nonsense.

If the point is to train Trump to toe the media line and manner and express things just so to their liking, that misses entirely the reason of Trump's stupendous acceptance and his sudden and shocking rise in politics. It is this quality that propelled him. Reporters give Trump reason to continue in this manner, not shape up to their ways of processing.

Trump's crowd roars with approval when at each rally Trump points directly to the media in the back rows and calls them out specifically telling the crowd the media are all liars. The worst of the worst, the lowest of low. And outside of rallies, at his own home, Trump treats them as such, corralling them into a holding room, a pen provided with only a table of Trump branded water, then for the speech outside the room (pen) segregated from regular people, his people, and previously having them park their sloppy jalopies well away from his regular people with regular (spectacular) automobiles close in. Trump tells his crowd how they will mangle covering his events, and they all do so reliably and predictably.

Every news outlet, every single one, delivered the exact same spin allowing no other interpretation. Telling us the opposite of what we heard with our own ears.

Even the BBC reports flatly, and reports this to the world, "Donald Trump urged his second amendment supporters to murder Hillary Clinton." He did no such thing. Not by a long shot. This on the heretofore respected tax-supported British socialist news agency with worldwide reach. A flat lie delivered by a dope for any observer who watched the Wilmington N.Carolina rally in real time, available here. See for yourself if you like. The speech is short and sweet.

"Maybe the 2nd Amendment people can stop her" By showing up in force to vote, he is suggesting, not some gun crackpot working up the fury to kill her, you dopes! That is how you think and the opposite of how 2A people think. That's you projecting your own murder fantasies onto law abiding citizens. Again. At this late point the only people accepting this bizarre interpretation are already dead set against Trump for reasons of their own.

It's obnoxious. And now that obnoxiousness is standard, now every word out of Trump is held up for examination for its most dangerous possible interpretation. Now that impulse it taken to magnitudes of order beyond anything remote to objective reporting rendering the entire class of reporters 100% worthless. Now on any given matter regarding Trump listeners must just roll their eyes and dismiss every single word spit and sputtered from their stuttering mouths informed by their massively rattled minds. And worse than all that now, even conservative bloggers closer to home covering the same bogus story, and covering it as bogus are compelled to deliver their disclaimers before getting to their point so that readers must bear again more anti-Trump descriptors to get to that tiny nugget of insight that illuminates nothing at all.

Example: Roger Simon. I like Simon a lot and this is not disqualifying but it is typical.  I find him among the most sensible and level-headed of political bloggers. He wants to tell us the reason media despises Trump is because Trump is the candidate that threatens their position directly. Simon's point is that of all the things that Hillary says she will do, the Washington reporters dismiss with a wink. They know that she has no intention of following through with the programs that threaten the media's lofty position. Simon says that reporters go, "wink, wink " and give Hillary that pass but they cannot do that with Trump. They cannot read Trump, he's too unpredictable, he really can damage their position in society. So they despise him. But to get to that the reader must bear through Simon quoting someone else and their  description of Trump using the ragged descriptors already rejected by Trump supporters. The reader must see again:
demagogue
racist
nationalist
dictators
dangerous
nuclear codes

All that in the quoted inset. Then Simon's own descriptors.
loudmouth
blowhard
poor impulse control

Now referring back to others.
racist (again)
sexist
demagogue (again)

Jesus Christ! How many times must our eyeballs take in those same words? The first five paragraphs are 100% useless. They can be skipped without missing anything. They build up to the point. They repeat the same words already rejected by Trump supporters and most followers, rendering all that 100% annoyingly useless and now at a whole magnitude of annoyance. Writers cannot help themselves. They all follow this pattern of repeating and disclaiming, then finally some precious nugget that makes the entire effort not only just wasted but tremendously annoying and thoroughly damaging to their craft and their profession, such as it is.

Curating one's own input has become a tremendously unhappy task so that 100% shutdown until November  is the single solution. It is not possible to receive anything rational regarding politics across media. And comments to articles are even worse. They can provide source material and that's it. Anything that comes with additional words, any opinion attached to source material must be disregarded. Tossed teething toys not even wiped off and returned to the crib.

[I did learn a new phrase today that applies, "pigeon chess" but that new useful phrase was seen in comments to Smithsonian article about why T-Rex's arms are so short.]

17 comments:

edutcher said...

Chip, you must write doctoral dissertations as a side income (kidding, you are getting very good with these).

It needn't be delivered in order. This is how people really do speak, asides, sprinkled in, however with Trump a bit excessively as if sprinkling salt with with a Trump aside-shaker all over his speeches. It's spicy. It's entertaining. His crowd loves hearing the same points repeated rally to rally. They go there physically to hear it again, to be near the man making them.

You got his appeal. He talks to people the way they talk to each other. He talks so they understand him implicitly.

edutcher said...

On that subject, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Lefties really did wish someone - Assange - dead.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Even the BBC reports flatly, and reports this to the world, "Donald Trump urged his second amendment supporters to murder Hillary Clinton." He did no such thing. Not by a long shot.

That was figurative speech... Chip is not saying Hillary should be gunned down close range ;)

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

The media is a house organ for Democrats.

The idea that George Stephanpolis is taken seriously (just as one example) is a crisis.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The thing that bugs me about the coverage is everything is blown up out of proportion with hyper sensational words, and then when you rea thru, the thing causing hyperventilation is trivial at best.

Hillary's health is not trivial... but the way they get around that one, they call it "conspiracy theory".

Whenever they don't want something examined they call it conspiracy theory.

Now, there are conspiracy theories, we know it when we hear it... 9/11 inside job, there was no moon landing...

Hillaries poor health is not a conspiracy theory!

Sorry I'm getting off topic a little.

edutcher said...

No one takes Steffi seriously.

PS Hey, Chip, are you sure that new phrase wasn't "pigeon chest" (or chested) instead of "pigeon chess"?

edutcher said...

Lem, what I think you mean is this.

Now, if you can just embed it in the post...

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

McCain wasn't smart enough to over-come the DNC-MSM.
Romney wasn't smart enough to over-come the DNC-MSM.
Trump is proving he's not smart enough to over-come the DNC-MSM.

GWB - who was considered a big dummy - out-smarted the DNC-MSM. although I think his out-smarting the DNC-MSM is what caused out current crisis in the media. They don't even try to hide it now, and the left's devious ownership of all mass-media is no accident.

edutcher said...

AprilApple said...

Trump is proving he's not smart enough to over-come the DNC-MSM.

I think the point of the post is that he is getting his message out. Some people are proving they're not smart enough to see it.

And the word is overcome, no hyphen.

GWB - who was considered a big dummy - out-smarted the DNC-MSM. although I think his out-smarting the DNC-MSM is what caused out current crisis in the media. They don't even try to hide it now, and the left's devious ownership of all mass-media is no accident.

How and what did he do differently? IIRC, he did pretty much what The Donald does. That's why the media laughed at him.

If you mean the election itself and Palm Beach County, that was Jim Baker's doing and it had nothing to do with the media except that they bitched and whined how it should have been the Living Redwood and not Dubya.

They've been doing this since at least '64. They certainly did it with Reagan, but then everybody said the same things about Reagan they say about Trump.

Chip Ahoy said...

My favorite part about the phrase pigeon chess is its origin at Amazon book review.

A pointless debate with somebody utterly ignorant of the subject matter, but standing on a dogmatic position that cannot be moved with any amount of education or logic, but who always proclaims victory.

Urban dictionary.

Origin:
"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." -- Scott D. Weitzenhoffer (From an Amazon.com book review)

There were only two comments at Smithsonian T-Rex short arms article, (that did not explain why t-Rex had short arms btw) The first was religious person dismissing the whole argument of evolution. The second comment: I have two only two words: pigeon chess.

edutcher said...

OK, my bad.

Definition of pigeon chested

The Dude said...

Why just earlier today, while contemplating getting rid of some of my chess sets, I thought "No one plays chess these days". Yep, I use quotes when I think.

But now I know why - no one likes to play through the guano.

Methadras said...

What did I tell you all. The RMPC media is breathless in it's condemnation of Trump at all levels. His mere existence is an affront to the Parkinson's Harpy. They will use anything and everything against him. The guy has been in the public eye for decades and never once was he called a racist, then he runs for president and all bets are off. Go figure, but now with the RMPC's. Even if he does win the presidency, they will hound him into infinity with every tactic they can think of. If you guys thought they were unhinged now, which they are, wait until he wins.

ndspinelli said...

Lem will remember the former Red Sox manager, Joe Morgan. Joe was a blue collar guy. He drove snow plow trucks during the winter. I LOVED the guy. No matter how down to earth people are, they still have a bit of formality when they are interviewed on TV. Yes, Trump is much different than all other politicians in being unfiltered. But, he still goes into interview mode and you can tell it's now he talks if he were sitting down and chatting sans camera. The aforementioned Joe Morgan had NO..NONE..NADA affectation when he was interviewed. He sounded just like a guy in a bar talking baseball. Beautiful to watch and hear.

chickelit said...

Face it: the media - including the vaunted Jake Tapper - yearn for the media kill shot against Trump. They are supremely frustrated because they are shooting blanks.

Synova said...

"Trump tells his crowd how they will mangle covering his events, and they all do so reliably and predictably."

I just realized that Obama used this same tactic. He'd tell his crowd how people were going to oppose him because they were racists, and people would predictably oppose him.

I've also been thinking about the rhetorical pitch and talking like people talk with asides and stuff. Conversational.

Back when Obama was running for president I recall being appalled at some of the stuff he'd say and how he'd say it and other people (probably most of them here) reacting the same way. His jokes were personal, his humor was snide, his speeches were gassy and his tone of voice was lofty... still is lofty. How people can say such base things in such lofty ways is amazing. And I specifically remember a certain blogger explaining that it really wasn't anything but how academics generally talk and for that segment of the population it wasn't horrible, it was restful and familiar.

Which is undoubtedly true, but mind-boggling at the same time.

And I've seen people now saying that Trump needs to start talking like politicians talk... he needs to be more careful or he's just throwing the election to Hillary.

And I say, that worked awesome for McCain and Romney. It worked great for the other Republican candidates this cycle.

Meanwhile Hillary apparently gave a speech in Utah waxing admirably about some female Mormon heroine she most certainly had never heard of in her entire life.

Because that's what politicians do.

Because people in Utah don't talk like Obama but they don't talk like Trump either so Hillary thinks she has a chance there if she pretends to talk like a Mormon.

I actually started to wonder if instead language drift due to geographic isolation if our language will split by ideological isolation... ending with our inability to speak with each other at all.

Third Coast said...

If Trump stated "the sun rose in the East today", the media would twist it to mean he's beholden to Putin's future eastern European empire. Really. It wouldn't surprise me.