Well, one of the reasons, I believe, that Taibbi wrote that article has to do
with what he wrote in his book about covering the Trump campaign and what I've
heard him say in interviews. He has a sense of guilt because he was covering
the campaign, seeing Trump as totally ridiculous, seeing Trump's followers as
a bunch of ignorant losers, and then Trump became President. And Taibbi feels
that he misjudged what he was seeing during all those months. And remember,
Taibbi is a journalist and he takes his role pretty seriously.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2017 9:30 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Blame the Media for Creating a World Dumb Enough
for Trump
Matt Taibbi blames the "Media" for dumbing down Americans to the place that,
like a gaggle of drooling, slobbering, Zombies, they stumble along behind
Donald Trump, cawing and croaking out his name in worshipful tones.
But just who is this "Media" Matt Taibbi talks about?
Could he be talking about a bunch of hard working journalists, being misled by
Trump's Ghouls?
Tempting though it is to point the finger at Trump and His Royal Court, the
real villain is none of them. Not the boys on Wall street or on Madison
Avenue, or the Brass at the Pentagon, sucking up our tax dollars.
No. The Media is just another phony Straw Man set out to distract us.
The one instigator behind our mad rush toward annihilation, is Greed.
Greed is driving the Media to misrepresent, mislead, and out and out lie. And
over the years Greed has made the lies more simplified so as to be easier to
swallow.
And why would Greed care to render Americans simple minded? To better
manipulate and mislead them.
As long as Americans stay linked to their televisions and their iPads and other
electronic gadgets, they will continue to move toward becoming mindless husks.
It's time we took a stand against Greed! Turn off our TV's and other mass
media gadgets. Stop purchasing the junky glitter that is being shoved off on
us. Stop wondering what Donald Trump is twitting today, and just assume that
Donald Trump is always up to no good. Tell your congress people to cut the
Pentagon's budget in half. 54% of our tax dollars is far too much, since they
can't seem to account for several billions. Demand that the government begin
bringing our troops home and retraining them to be Peace Keepers, building new
low cost housing, rebuilding our infrastructure, training to care for the
elderly and the children of working mothers, teach them to be youth workers,
and send them out into our communities and farmlands.
Tell congress that our future...the way to prevent Terrorists from coming into
our nation, is to provide a high quality of free education to All of our
children, as far as they can each achieve.
Let your congress people know that if they can't seem to hear you, or don't
want to serve you, then you will be at hand to assist them into the ranks of
the unemployed.
And most importantly, make time to organize and attend Town Meetings...from
coast to coast.
That should do for a beginning.
Carl Jarvis
Carl Jarvis
On 8/26/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Matt Taibbi has a relatively new podcast called, The Tarfu Report,
which I discovered yesterday. I listened to Episode 7 today which is
about Trump's personality. There were several clips from the Arizona
speech which I hadn't heard. I don't listen to Trump unless there's a
clip that's part of a newscast or discussion so I manage to forget how
truly crazy he is. But what I heard today was horrifying, not because
the content was especially racist or war like, but because Trump's
personality disorder is so clearly evident.
It is incomprehensible to me that no one who knows how truly disturbed
he is, couldn't have done something to prevent his getting into office.
Miriam
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally. (photo: Chip
Somodevilla/Getty
Images)
Blame the Media for Creating a World Dumb Enough for Trump
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
26 August 17
Yet another TV executive says Trump is "good for business." Is sudden
good fortune of news media by accident or design?
The craziest part of Donald Trump's 77-minute loon-a-thon in Phoenix
earlier this week came when he rehashed his shtick about the networks
turning off live coverage of his speech. Trump seemed to really
believe they were shutting the cameras off because "the very dishonest
media" was so terrified of his powerful words.
"They're turning those lights off so fast!" he said. "CNN doesn't want
its failing viewership to see this!"
Trump is wrong about a lot of things, but it's hard to be more wrong
about any one thing than he was about this particular point.
No news director would turn off the feed in the middle of a Trump-meltdown.
This presidency has become the ultimate ratings bonanza. Trump
couldn't do better numbers if he jumped off Mount Kilimanjaro carrying a
Kardashian.
This was confirmed this week by yet another shruggingly honest TV
executive
- in this case Tony Maddox, head of CNN International. Maddox said CNN
is doing business at "record levels." He hinted also that the monster
ratings they're getting have taken the sting out of being accused of
promoting fake news.
"[Trump] is good for business," Maddox said. "It's a glib thing to
say. But our performance has been enhanced during this news period."
Maddox, speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival, added that most of the
outlets that have been singled out by Trump are doing a swimming
business. "If you look at the groups that Trump has primarily
targeted: CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Saturday Night
Live, Stephen Colbert," he said, "every single one of those has seen a
quite remarkable growth in their viewing figures, in their sales
figures."
Everyone hisses whenever they hear quotes like these. They recall the
infamous line from last year by CBS chief Les Moonves, about how Trump
"may not be good for America, but he's damn good for CBS." Moonves was
even cheekier than Maddox. He laughed and added, "The money's rolling
in, and this is fun. They're not even talking about issues, they're
throwing bombs at each other, and I think the advertising reflects that."
For more than two years now, it's been obvious that Donald Trump is a
disaster on almost every level except one - he's great for the media
business. Most of us who do this work have already gone through the
process of working out just how guilty we should or should not feel about
this.
Many execs and editors - and Maddox seems to fall into this category -
have convinced themselves that the ratings and the money are a kind of
cosmic reward for covering Trump responsibly. But deep down, most of
us know that's a lie. Donald Trump gets awesome ratings for the same
reason Fear Factor made money feeding people rat-hair tortilla chips:
nothing sells like a freak show. If a meteor crashes into jello night
at the Playboy mansion, it doesn't matter if you send Edward R. Murrow
to do the standup. Some things sell themselves.
The Trump presidency is like a diabolical combination of every schlock
eyeball-grabbing formula the networks have ever deployed. It's Battle
of the Network Stars meets Wrestlemania meets Survivor meets the Kursk
disaster.
It's got the immediacy of a breaking news crash, with themes of
impending doom, conflict, celebrity meltdown, anger, racism, gender war,
everything.
Trump even sells on the level of those Outbrain click-addicting photos
of plastic surgery failures. With his mystery comb-over and his great
rolls of restrained blubber and the infamous tales of violent fights
with his ex over a failed scalp-reduction procedure, Trump on top of
being Hitler and Hulk Hogan from a ratings perspective is also a
physical monster, the world's very own bearded-lady tent.
Trump's monstrousness is ironic, since the image of Trump as the
media's very own Frankenstein's monster has been used and re-used in
the last years.
Many in the business are of the opinion that, having created Trump and
let him loose in the village, we in the press now have a
responsibility to hunt him down with aggressive investigative
reporting, to make the world safe again.
That might indeed be a good idea. But that take also implies that
slaying the monster will fix the problem. Are we sure that's true?
Reporters seem to think so, and keep trying to find the magic formula.
Just this week, staffers at the Wall Street Journal rebelled against
editor-in-chief Gerard Baker. Baker, who has long been accused of
being too soft on Trump, blasted his people for going too negative on
the president in their coverage of the Arizona speech. He sent around
a letter asking staff to "stick to reporting what [Trump] said,"
rather than "packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism."
Reporters fought back by (apparently) leaking the memo to the rival
New York Times. This followed an incident in which a transcript of
Baker's recent interview with Trump was leaked to Politico earlier
this month. In it, Baker mentions being glad to have seen Ivanka Trump
in Southampton, and small-talks with Trump about travel and golf. The
implication here is that it's improper or unseemly for a newspaper
editor to have a chummy relationship with this kind of a president.
And it is, sometimes. Reporters who should be challenging presidents
and candidates are pretty much always cheating the public when they
turn interviews into mutual back rub sessions.
But these intramural ethical wars within our business may just be
deflections that keep us from facing bigger problems - like, for
instance, the fact that we have been systematically making the entire
country more stupid for decades.
We learned long ago in this business that dumber and more alarmist
always beats complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality,
scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad, they all sell. We
decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and
created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear,
self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment.
There isn't a news executive alive low enough to deny that we use
xenophobia and racism to sell ads. Black people on TV for decades were
almost always shirtless and chased by cops, and the "rock-throwing
Arab" photo was a staple of international news sections even before
9/11. And when all else fails in the media world, just show more
cleavage somewhere, and ratings go up, every time.
Donald Trump didn't just take advantage of these conditions. He was
created in part by them. What's left of Trump's mind is like a parody
of the average American media consumer: credulous, self-centered,
manic, sex-obsessed, unfocused, and glued to stories that appeal to
his sense of outrage and victimhood.
We've created a generation of people like this: anger addicts who
can't read past the first page of a book. This is why the howls of
outrage from within the ranks of the news media about Trump's election
ring a little bit false.
What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise
to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment?
Sensitive
geniuses?
We spent years selling the lowest common denominator. Now the lowest
common denominator is president. How can it be anything but
self-deception to pretend this is an innocent coincidence?
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