For this article. I misplaced it in the Trump thread. It deserves it's own space.


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... es/537909/

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Seconded

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

That was awful.

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Much preferred this partial rejoinder to Coates as well as those who seek to downplay identity politics altogether: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/09/11 ... si-coates/

I have hated Trump as much as anyone I know for as long as I've known him, but I honestly think I'm going to end up supporting him after reading some of these nonsensical articles and seeing Liberals so hysterical and willing to act like anyone who doesn't despise him is a racist.

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Just cure whiteness and everything will be fine.

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I guess that the safest way to put this is that from my kind of perspective, the article reads completely different. It, nor do I really want to completely denigrate most large groups of people. But the hysterics so many display after a frank resuscitation of a large part of American history are still baffling. And yes, I feel that his discussion is "fair", a word curiously now in heavy use by Trump supporters.

Much that he wrote is certainly honest, but the characterization that he's the one who is hysterical is misplaced imo.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

yea in the fucking garbage can...

That isn't the argument that Coates is making though.

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No his argument is that white people were mad that a black person was president so they elected Donald Trump to punish them. Its nonsense, complete idiocy that has no basis in reality.

There is a correlation between those that believed in birtherism and those that voted for Trump. Statistics have shown that to be true.

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ok

BLM elected Donald Trump, own it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates would've beaten Hillary in the election.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I'm pretty sure that isn't his argument.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.

I've been accused of being a Trump supporter in this forum (and in certain circles that's about the worst possible accusation one can hurl at someone), mostly because I have tried to discuss the way the media has covered Trump. My interest in the subject has little to do with Trump himself. It is really about my fascination with media/advertising/perceptions and the way they are all interconnected.

When I talk about "fairness" with regard to Donald Trump, it's not really about Trump at all. In fact, I enjoy seeing a silver spoon like Trump get it shoved up his ass for once in his life. No, the fairness I'm talking about is fairness for you and me and the rest of the American electorate. We should be able to receive the news without it being filtered through the prism of someone else's politics, whatever those politics may be.

And I know that someone is likely to say that the new has always been slanted. William Randolph Hearst wasn't exactly promoting unbiased truth. But the newspaper business evolved over time and adopted certain standards that are rapidly disappearing/have disappeared in the Internet age. A good example is the Russian dossier story. No reputable news organization would have touched that story. But when Buzzfeed published it, it was out there. So the "reputable" media uses this little trick for clicks rather than simply ignoring it as beneath them (which it should be considering the background, way it was sourced, etc.). They report the story this way: "____________ is reporting that..." That gives them cover when the story turns out to be baseless while allowing them to actually report it. It's not what I call journalism.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.

To be fair I stop reading about 1/4 of the way in when I'm confronted with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"You have GOT to read this", and then white people share it to each other and I can just envision them all nodding like "yea yea...this is right...I get it now" but really there's nothing to get. Its meaningless trash that pretends to be for one audience but truthfully appeals to another. Its just more of the echo chamber, and I find myself just thinking about that while reading than whatever he's complaining about in his writing that I close the tab and finding something else.

See I tend to think the press should have a more and not less adversarial relationship with politicians in general. And I'm not going to shed crocodile tears about them suddenly being mean or "unfair" to Trump just because they failed at their jobs in the past by treating previous politicians with kid gloves. The bad policies that Trump is actually promoting bother me a helluva lot more than mere procedural questions about whether he would have gotten a pass on them if he was another politician. And quite frankly I think most of the people who are more concerned about such "fairness" are either partisans of Trump or in a privileged position where his actual policies only marginally affect them and so they're able to focus on the discourse and procedural fairness instead of more substantive issues.

I'm guessing Math is not in your end of the Education, Inc. boondoggle.


or...

#CommonCore

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Obama's Legacy is Trump.
And dead cops.

"One guy lays the pipe, the other guy smokes it"--Clint Eastwood

There's a difference between the press having an adversarial relationship with politicians and the press using its platform to promote political beliefs of their own. Not that there isn't a place for opinion in media, but news should be news. You can write the story anyway you want.

You're entitled to think that Trump is promoting bad policies. The guy reporting about the policies shouldn't be suggesting to you that they are bad. You can make up your own mind. You're probably certain you have, but now we may be getting into "advertising doesn't work on me" territory.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.

You admit yourself that there's never been a value-free presentation of the news but then seem troubled that there's currently no value-free presentation of the news. Beyond this, many of your complaints about the treatment of Trump haven't just been limited to journalists suddenly violating their fake objectivity in writing news stories, but have just as often focused on the explicitly editorial side of things as well ("Where was the outrage when Obama/Hillary also did..."). Likewise, asking Trump or his cronies hard questions in pressers isn't a case of unfair reporting, but again a healthy instance of an adversarial press.

The outlets that have most used their role on the reporting side of things to promote political beliefs of their own are primarily those sources most sympathetic to Trump and the Republican party, not against them. Yet it seems it's all fair in love and politics when it's the Kochs and Aileses and Sinclair Groups and Clear Channels, but a sign of a unhinged media when there's any perceived spin at all in the opposite direction against the president. Did you devote as much time to these issues of procedural fairness during the Obama administration out of curiosity? Why or why not?

I happen to think the media is and has been broken for a long time. I also happen to think pretty much most of the bias against Trump in that class comes down to how he acts and comes across far more than any policy disagreement. Pence or Jeb or Romney could probably push the exact same disgusting agenda as Trump and receive far cushier treatment from the press because he's more "presidential." But even if tougher coverage is the product of appearances rather than anything principled at all, I don't really care because I'm a consequentialist on this issue. I value tougher coverage of politicians as a good in general and specifically don't care if people are opposing Trump's policies in the here and now for the right or wrong reasons.

I still say that this chick is hot

I think the collapse of what we knew as the standard newspaper business model wherein there were definitive lines between news/editorial and advertising is a big part of the problem.

I know you're not comparing the overall media love affair Obama with the way Trump has been handled. Trump never gave anyone a thrill up his leg. Regardless, I'm sure I can find criticisms of Fox News on this site that I made during the Obama presidency. And it's a lot easier to dismiss something like the Washington Examiner than it is to dismiss CNN. I see things like Politico cited all the time as if they are unbiased observers of the American political scene.

I'll give you one really simple example of what I'm talking about. Obama halted immigration from Muslim countries and it was hardly covered. It certainly wasn't referred to by news organizations as a "Muslim Ban". It doesn't matter what your own opinion is on these policies, it should be obvious the coverage is different.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.

He's the best writer out there right now

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

I think you have a rather romantic and historically inaccurate view of the objectivity of newspapers. Even in the context of reporting news, they just as often defined what was politically acceptable and unacceptable as they just reported the facts. Looks at any historiography about how different protests have received and failed to receive coverage for instance. There was never any kind of "Just the facts, ma'am" era.

I also think if you're taking journalism as a vocation seriously, your anger should correspond to the sources' ratings, not whether you yourself take said sources seriously. Fox News attracts more viewers than any other cable news source and inserts political slants into ostensibly standard news coverage more than any other channel as well, yet the objections about an abdication of Serious Journalism seem launched against them less frequently than anyone else. Apparently you get a pass if you insert slants into your coverage for a sufficiently long period of time? Likewise, there are plenty of conservative news sources that do cover Trump with only glowing praise and had no kind of love affair with Obama at all. The mere fact that you yourself do not happen to consume such sources doesn't mean they don't count as part of the general press.

The Muslim travel ban is exactly one of the things I wish the press gave Obama a harder time about (though I note this remains a bit of a false equivalence in terms of the legal justifications and actual policies). The same goes for all the sob stories of deported immigrants that have been appearing since Trump took office; I wish those kinds of stories appeared with the same kind of frequency from 2009-2016 as well. You seem a lot more bothered by the pass the press gave Obama than anything in the present though, whereas I think such policies deserve the fullest amount of scrutiny regardless of which president is pushing them and have little use for the simplistic idea that Trump's policies should be free from such coverage just because Obama's were.

Soylent Green is people!

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I don't like Coates's use of the phrase "black bodies" for "black people."

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Honestly, that's how many black folks feel

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

check out this simpleton:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/arti ... si-coates/

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I don't think Trump's policies should be free from scrutiny simply because the media (for the most part, and honestly, easily understandably) had a love affair with Obama.

There's a lot going on with how people get their news. Media is rapidly evolving. Facebook and Twitter have replaced newspapers.

You chided me above for seeing the issue strictly from my own perspective, but now you're doing the same. I think we should acknowledge that both of us are more sophisticated than the average American receiver of news. If we weren't we wouldn't be having this conversation.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.