The truth about Donald Trump rarely makes it into the news | Press Watch
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Mainstream journalists are depriving their audiences of crucial context

Donald Trump has no coherent plan, other than self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.

He is making this stuff up as he goes along. He is impulsive and changes his mind constantly. He lies pathologically and is often incoherent. He promotes actions that are overtly illegal. He is hostile to every form of expertise. Others, most notably Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, are making decisions in his name that he doesn’t seem to know or care about.

Asked if he has to “uphold the Constitution,” he replied “I don’t know.”

He is also flailing. His approval rating is badly underwater. Judges have blocked many of his most consequential actions. His impetuous tariff proposal is backfiring massively, leading him to lie about imaginary trade deals as the economy teeters. Ordinary people are getting outraged by the administration’s hate-fueled cruelty toward nonwhite immigrants. His self-dealing is increasingly overt.

This is important context for any news article or segment about Trump, and yet it’s almost entirely left out of the daily coverage that he gets in mainstream media outlets.

Yep.

  • Libra00@lemmy.mlEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    You missed the most important part of the article, at the end:

    What Every Trump Article Needs

    Every article about Trump’s immigration policies needs to make it clear that those policies are steeped in racism.

    Every article reporting on what Trump said needs to make it clear that he is a serial liar.

    Every article quoting Trump needs to quote him at length, rather than cleaning up his incoherence.

    Every article about a Trump announcement needs to make it clear that he could very well reverse himself anytime.

    Every article about a Trump reversal needs to clearly indicate that the White House is in constant chaos, and that its reversals are deeply destabilizing

    Every article about something Trump says in a social media post needs to state that he often uses social media to impetuously propose irrational things that end up not happening.

    Every article involving him “testing the limits” of the rule of law needs to clearly indicate that he has no grasp of his constitutional responsibilities and is acting so unlawfully that he’s basically running a criminal enterprise.

    Every article about what Trump “believes” needs a caveat that his only consistent beliefs are self-interested.

    Every article about Trump enriching himself needs to make it clear that enriching himself is his dominant guiding principle.

    Every article about something the administration has done needs to question whether Trump is actually aware of it.

    Anything less than that is basically a cover-up.

    • pixelpop3@beehaw.org
      1·
      3 days ago

      I sort of feel like the only people even reading or paying attention to mainstream media don’t care about any of that. Everybody else is gone.

      • Libra00@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Where does this idea that mainstream media is being abandoned come from? I spend a fair bit of time on sites like lemmy (and previously reddit) and most of what I see all day long is articles linked from CNN or WSJ or NYT or whatever, plus a few links to second-tier sites like HuffPost, Salon, etc that are more about opinion or analysis than just reporting things as they happen. Sure, maybe some people get their news from twitter or whatever, but as far as I can tell the vast majority of people are still getting it from cable news or major newspapers, aka the mainstream media.

        • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgOPMEnglish
          1·
          13 hours ago

          There’s a very different proportion on Beehaw. I just scrolled through the first page of U.S. News posts to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my ass, and four posts (five if you lump the AP into this mess) are from the sorts of sources you name.

          I personally fled the leading U.S. newspaper conglomerate after 22 years in the industry because of what had started in terms of quality years ago. WaPo was canceled after the endorsement fuckup. And I’ve not had cable since moving out of my parents’ house.

          So, where does it come from? People who know what they’re talking about. We have a slightly higher standard than “as far as I can tell.”

        • pixelpop3@beehaw.org
          2·
          1 day ago

          Sites like Lemmy and Reddit are structurally designed to share mainstream media and the corporate media machine has adapted to shovel into them.

          I would wager a growing number of people get their news from podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Even on Reddit I doubt many are doing more than read the submission title. Personally, NPR, NYT and WP have lost me as subscribers over the last year with their blatantly manipulative and misleading shenanigans. The same is true among my broader circle of IRL people. So it could be a bubble but others have talked about this.

          In particular the DNC realized for half a moment that their typical method of carefully controlling mainstream media coverage isn’t working. You can trace it all back to Biden’s disastrous debate performance and then the cheerleading that Harris was winning. Corporate media just is not even remotely credible anymore and everyone knows it.

          But to get back to my original comment, what I said is the people still reading mainstream corporate media don’t care about the details talked about in the OP. They mostly just seem to lob article titles at each other in some dumb game of dodgeball where winning matters more than facts. The articles themselves have become complete trash.