Quote:
Originally Posted by ResAlien
The media did not do its job and instead allowed this to happen. They are complicit in this by allowing it to go unchecked in the name of ratings.
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Journalists have to eat and pay the rent.
If all media would focus on listing Trumps lies, tons of media would simply go bankrupt, because people in general are just not that interested.
We get the media most people are willing to pay for. Even people who ideologically support the existence of media that tells them things they don't want to hear (but should), almost never visit sites with views that significantly differ from their own. Which is the lowest possible effort to support such media. God forbid anyone actually pays for their news anymore.
Give that system time, and you have the media landscape as it is.
Besides, we're way past the point where the media is needed to normalize the Trump administrations constant lies, because it IS normal. Outright lying and blatant denial of facts have been a major part of the Republican playbook way before Trump, and Trump broke the final parts of that dam.
It's not like tons of journalists didn't write about it either. There are probably hundreds of thousands or millions of various articles, blogs, tweets and videos on the internet on this topic, starting pretty early in the Trump campaign.
Seriously, I don't agree the media dropped the ball on this at all.
There was even a completely unprecedent unified front of both liberal AND conservative media outlets specifically denouncing him as a dangerous charlatan.
The media did their job. Not enough people cared. That's not the medias fault.
Personally I feel the last presidential campaign burst the bubble that there is a significant amount of people in the world with reasonable skills for media criticism. I tend to hang in circles with mostly rather intelligent and critical minded liberals, and even in my precious little bubble I've constantly run into situations where I'm trying to explain to people that Trump isn't "business as usual". Never with success. Even when I clearly point out that "btw, you just posted fake news, links here and here for the actual facts", the best I can get is "all media is dumb".
When you point out to someone that "the article doesn't actually say what you thought the headline says", pretty much everybody will simply blame the headline.
People don't take responsibility for being informed, and that makes the medias job to actually inform people impossible. The real world is more complicated than what you can fit in the headline, but most people never read much more than that.