Consuming The "Fertilizer" Of Right-Wing Media

 

As networks and legacy media slowly obey in advance to the sociopathic Malignant Fascist's pressure to tailor news coverage to his liking, the MF has a major effort underway to steer people to social media and alternative "news" sources that parrot his line. Melanie McFarland at Salon.com looks at the changing landscape from recent firings at MSNBC and CNN, the heavy hand of WaPo owner and MF ass-kisser Jeff Bezos, and signs of the rise of propaganda over journalism and concludes:

"On Thursday, the Washington Post published an article about the White House’s 'rapid-response influencer operation, disseminating messages directly to Americans through the memes, TikToks and podcasts where millions now get their news.'

It continues, 'After years of working to undermine mainstream outlets and neutralize critical reporting, Trump’s allies are now pushing a parallel information universe of social media feeds and right-wing firebrands to sell the country on his expansionist approach to presidential power.'

Optimists may tell you that this tumult amounts to the birthing agony that precedes a new age of journalism, and they’re probably correct to some degree. But what will the next generation look like, and how long will it take to recover from this age of expanding disinformation and propaganda?

A free press that deals in facts and promotes diverse viewpoints is the water that nourishes a healthy democracy. But for it to function, citizens have to seek out those wells and insist on them. And that feels harder to do as the public is conditioned to consume the fertilizer that's piling up." (our emphasis)

McFarland's entire article is an excellent read into the diminished nature of America's media, which pleases the MF who abhors criticism and independent journalism, as any fascist would. 

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

A high-stakes legal drama around a pregnant woman in Texas and the Supreme Court’s announcement it will consider restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone are the latest unwelcome reminders for Republicans that abortion rights will be front and center ahead of the 2024 election.

Abortion has been a calamitous political issue for the GOP since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer — and it’s been a boon for Democrats, boosting them to a string of electoral victories on the issue and lowering their losses.

At a time when President Biden’s approval ratings are down and his party is badly divided over Israel’s war in Gaza, abortion rights are seen as a major unifying and motivating issue as 2024 heats up, particularly as Republicans can be cast as seeking to curtail access to the medical service.

Across-the-aisle tensions on abortion have been on full display over the last week after the Texas Supreme Court blocked Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, from having an abortion. Cox left the state to obtain an abortion just hours before the Texas court rejected her challenge.

Biden has already sought to wield the case as a cautionary tale against Republicans in power and against the GOP presidential front-runner, former President Trump.

“I don’t think they can escape it,” Republican strategist Liz Mair said of next year’s White House candidates, adding that the recent Texas case underscores the salience of the issue.

The forced- birth bastards won't escape their obscene record of interfering in women's reproductive rights.  Every weaseling attempt to do so (looking at you, Nikki "Windsock" Haley) must be swatted down.  And the fact that they insist on showing us who they are, and to what extent they'll go, keeps the issue at or near the top of the list for election 2024.

The bad:  

... More than a decade ago, a cadre of armed military and police personnel took an oath rooted in a conspiracy theory that a globalist cabal was working to steal Americans’ democratic birthright. That narrative was then mainstreamed on the most-watched “news” show on cable TV. And then a Republican presidential candidate exploited the narrative to mobilize a citizen army to steal back the White House after losing the election.

Now, nearly three years later, what should we expect the media establishment to have learned from missing an origin story of January 6? That much of Trump’s constituency understands violence as a central tool for achieving their political aims.

But has the media learned it?  [snip]

Forces are gathering on the Right that see their political aspirations as something worth killing for. When the likes of Mike Huckabee proudly announce the idea of bullets over ballots as an inevitability, media that omit the mounting potential for political violence from their political coverage are abdicating basic journalistic responsibility. It’s certainly as important as totting up who can be expected to caucus for whom in Iowa, or who’s winning over Virginia’s soccer moms.

Horse-race reporting has its place. But it won’t matter much if the men in the MAGA hats blow up the horse track.

That's Rick Perlstein concluding a case for how a decade of media malpractice -- from coverage of the Tea Party and the Oath Keepers by CNN, to the coverage of the Malignant Loser in 2015 /16 -- enabled the  January 6 insurrection and continues to downplay or ignore the "epidemic of right- wing terror" in this country today.

The ugly:

Former President Donald Trump is pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail again as he took aim at people coming to the U.S. and “poisoning the blood of our country” during a rally on Saturday.

Trump, who has echoed the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in a recent speech pledging to “root out... vermin” political foes, ranted about immigrants to supporters in Durham, New Hampshire.

“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America... but all over the world,” Trump said of immigrants.

“They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” he continued. “They’re pouring into our country. Nobody is even looking at them, they just come in and the crime is going to be tremendous, the terrorism is going to be.”

Trump also quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack President Joe Biden, saying: “Even Vladimir Putin … says that Biden’s, and this is a quote, politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”

Along with name-dropping Putin, the former president also mentioned two other authoritarian figures during his rally: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. He called Kim “very nice” and Orbán “highly respected,” adding that the latter said “Trump is the man who can save the western world”...

Un- American.  Pure fascist.  Racist.  

The odds- on favorite to be the Christofascist Republican nominee, for the third time, is as evil and deranged a demagogue as those he echoes.  And his MAGAt cult is with him all the way. 

Our Elite Media Are Failing Us -- Normalizing Fascism Edition

 

Paul Campos at LGM offers yet one more example, based on a "chatty cheerful conversation among four of [the New York Times'] op/ed columnists" on their digital page (no link), of how our elite media are normalizing fascism:

America is on the edge of installing a fascist dictatorship via a presidential election. This really shouldn’t be in any way controversial. I mean if you want to get all technical and pedantic you could say America is on the ee of installing an authoritarian dictatorship with a number of strikingly fascist-like features, so we don’t have to get into a stupid argument about whether Donald Trump actually meets the fascist minimum, whatever that might be defined to require.

And one reason this is about to happen is that our media elites simply refuse to acknowledge this extremely obvious fact. If they did, they couldn’t possibly hold chummy conversations among themselves about how Biden and Trump are both unsatisfactory options — a view I share if “unsatisfactory” in one case means “this pizza is slightly overcooked and therefore unsatisfactory,” while in the other case it means “this bubonic plague is an unsatisfactory disease.” 

Campos cites recent polling (which, a year out, should be taken with a fist full of salt) showing Biden trailing the Malignant Loser in 5 of 6 battleground states, demonstrating the extent to which many Americans either don't understand the fascist threat or approve of it.  The media's (in this case, the NYT, though you could easily substitute the Washington Post, network news, etc.) failure to acknowledge the fact that we're potentially on the verge of a fascist takeover of America (but, "Joe Biden is old!") confirms Masha Gessen's prescient warnings that institutions like the media/ press won't save us, and that we should not "be taken in by small signs of normality." 

BONUS:  Look at who the Washington Post is installing as its new publisher and CEO; Q.E.D.