Friday, January 19, 2018

faux or faux faux?

Politico thinks The Donald's accusations of "fake news" are a lot of hot air. The article makes one interesting point with which I somewhat agree:

Trump doesn’t really hate the press, as I argued two months ago. He relies on it as a scapegoat and as something to push against when he needs an applause line.

For a media guy like Trump, any publicity is good publicity. Praise Trump, and he purrs in contentment. Excoriate Trump, and he purrs in contentment. For lefties who are rolling on the ground, kicking and screaming, it would behoove them to understand this point if they truly want to combat Trump and unseat him in 2020.

Meanwhile, we've got this assessment of the media's coverage of Trump during 2017: it was 90% negative. (The data are from the Media Research Center, a conservative organization based in Virginia.)

The major findings:

■ The Trump presidency was the biggest story of the year, accounting for one out of every three minutes of evening news airtime — nearly 100 hours in total.

■ The tone of coverage has been incessantly hostile, especially for a new President in his honeymoon year: 90% negative, vs. just 10% positive (These percentages do not include neutral statements).

■ More than two-fifths of evening news coverage of the President (43%) focused on controversies, not policies, with the Russia investigation alone accounting for one-fifth of all Trump coverage (1,234 minutes).

■ Despite their massive coverage of Russia, the networks had almost no airtime for questions about how the investigation began, or whether special counsel Robert Mueller’s current investigation is biased.

So—is it all fake news all the time, or is the fake-news claim itself fake?

Tomorrow is the one-year mark for Trump's presidency; he was inaugurated on January 20 of last year. I promised you that I would hold off on judging the president until I'd had a year to evaluate him as a leader. Sometime over the weekend, then, you can expect my unprofessional opinion on The Donald's first 365 days in the Oval Orifice. Stay tuned.

PS: given that I only recently gave birth to a nearly 18,000-word essay on a movie, I don't have it in me to write a long screed about Trump, so don't expect anything too lengthy.



1 comment:

John Mac said...

I don't think there is any question that the news media has gone off the rails with their unconcealed hatred of the President. It's actually quite amusing watching Trump play them to his own benefit. Never seen so many smart people act so damn stupid.