White folks are going off on the media for its role in the rise of Donald Trump.
White folks are going off on the media for its role in the rise of Donald Trump.
John Oliver said it best. You can’t blame the media, an industry with paying customers in advertising corporations and product in the way of viewers, readers and commenters, for giving its audience what they wanted.
And what they wanted, like more cowbell, was more Donald Trump.
Whether that swung the election, swayed public opinion and all that other stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is that what we saw wasn’t always representative of what a democracy with a healthy fourth estate should’ve represented. What should’ve been represented more is the anger associated with the varying forms of disenfranchisement — people of color who feel put out by white privilege, and white people who are mad about the disintegration of their privilege.
That’s the eloquent way of establishing the standard of what the coverage could have been. Here’s what happens when it isn’t explained or executed responsibly.
Bill Maher snaps.
Nate Silver snaps.
Facebook admits it has responsibility to stem the tide of ‘fake news.’
Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform
Facebook has responded to widespread criticism of how its Newsfeed algorithm disseminates and amplifies misinformation…techcrunch.com
Van Jones releases the ‘Trump Supporter Lost Tapes’
Don Lemon doesn’t get paid to expose the core of American ugliness, he gets paid to make sure that people see it under the guise of balanced coverage. That’s what media is — an entertainment vehicle with journalistic tendencies, not the other way around.
It’s like expecting a textbook on arachnids to give you the a chapter on the creation story of Spider Man. Information, about processes that are generally foreign to average Americans, will not be sexy. No one cares if the electoral college is a racist, archaic form of election, people do care that the last two times is it alleged to have failed, it has been to the benefit of the Republican party.
That’s what it at the heart of this — a two party system where its members believe the other side to be socially inept, fiscally draconian, and culturally entitled. Once we get to the heart of that story, we’ll begin to retooling of American politics.
