Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today?

For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time.

But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      Most likely its a mix of cognitive dissonance (it can’t happen here) and not really caring as theyre mostly well off liberals (oh well, if it does, im wealthy so my life won’t seriously change that much!).

  • kowcop@aussie.zone
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    7 months ago

    yeah they do, they are just frothing as what that means for the bullshit that they peddle

  • Naminreb@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    An article exploiting Trump’s image to gather traffic while telling us media doesn’t grasp Trump’s manipulation of the media…got it.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgOP
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      7 months ago

      The article isn’t about “Trump’s manipulation of the media”, it’s about the sensationalism that revenue-driven news falls into, both by necessity and by convenience, and how that model is unequipped to handle rhetoric that is ‘slow-burning’.

      Trump is not playing 4D chess, he’s just being his usual horrible self each day, but the media is unable to simply run “Trump still horrible” each day, so they end up treating his current horrible-ness as a new baseline after the shock wears off, which just normalizes his behavior.

      It’s like the inverse of the boy crying wolf, where the wolves really are attacking each day, but since everyone “knows” that, the town crier kid stops telling people the wolves are attacking unless they attack in some novel way, and over time the wolves attacking isn’t even ‘bad’, it’s just how the villagers live.

  • jaspersgroove@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    They grasp it just fine, but they make money of covering him and have enough of said money to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions.

    • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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      7 months ago

      He got 3 lying Supreme Court justices to the bench the first time around. And now some of my kid’s rights have been removed.

      Yes, vote, but don’t do so thinking that he’s somehow not a threat — he most definitely is.

  • Naminreb@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    An article exploiting Trump’s image to gather traffic while telling us media doesn’t grasp Trump’s manipulation of the media…got it.