Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/29/every-trump-lie-will-be-instan.html
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And this is where Gish Gallop has taken us.
So many falsehoods of varying degrees and the whole Idea that “Fact Checking” is partisan and there are no facts.
Truthiness I stab at thee.
The Tangerine Nightmare is Nigh.
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Laundered instantly, maybe. But debunked pretty quickly, too. And this is hardly a new development. The press has a long tradition of regurgitating press releases as news.
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Isn’t this exactly how it worked under Bush? The only difference is, Bush’s lies had all the hallmarks of real hand craftsmanship. Trump’s lies are shoddily mass-produced.
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So either stop retweeting his tweets, or make the headline say “Trump lies about…”
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If we’ve learned anything from the last year (8 years?) it’s that debunking lies and myths doesn’t make a bit of difference to whether or not most Americans still believe it.
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Gessen’s Rule for Surviving an Autocracy #3: Institutions will not save you:
The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Drumpf campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign
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Sadly Boing Boing isn’t much better. Misleading headings are now the norm, no matter what your ideological tilt. I do wish BB spent a bit more time fact checking and moved away from a lot of the tabloid style sensationalist headings you see here every day. I understand that sometimes people are being sarcastic… But Americans (well let’s expand that to include most of the english speaking world) can not afford to be subtle or clever right now – it needs to be clear and concise and reclaim meaning in the face of a population who largely can no longer tell the difference. When people have got their heads screwed back on tight you can play with words and post the odd puff of fluff, but not now. People need to get grounded and fast.
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Ahahaha what investigative press? We have none. The press just serves the establishment in exchange for access. The only difference is that now we have an autocratic madman instead of a relatively benign fake centrist.
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Most, or some?
NYT: Trump Takes Credit for Sprint Plan to Add 5,000 Jobs in U.S.
The New York Times is the only one with a fig-leaf (“takes credit”) whose wording winks at the fact that it’s hogwash.
I don’t see it as a fig leaf or as “winking.” It’s factual. Do they explicitly need to use the words “lie” or “liar”? Even that would be incorrect, since Trump is a bullshitter not a liar.
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That’s an exageration. There is some very good investigative reporting. But not in the same proportion as in the days of newsprint. There is SO much published, the good the bad, the ugly, the stupid, the insane, the commercial and banal that everything is just one drop in a vast ocean of crap, We are dying of thirst for a lack of filters…
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Sarcasm and clever subtleties aside, @xeni regurgitated this headline earlier today.
“Not sure how this benefits Trump Org, but we can rest assured that it does somehow.”
You can do better than this @xeni. Rather than resting assured that this is somehow benefiting Trump Org, a journalist should cite some facts or begin digging.
My money is on “most.” Media literacy and critical thinking are not priorities in our public education system or in most Americans’ everyday lives.
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These things just never used to be news at all. An off-the-cuff remark about jobs coinciding with a corporate press release would be maybe a state AP blip at best–and it would be reported out if they bothered, with an hour or two lead time to make calls and check Lexis-Nexus for the company’s recent goings-on.
There’s a convergence of problems and circumstances here that led to this, but you can nail it all down with this: Trump is Traffic. Media interested in survival all have a strategy, conscious or otherwise, for being able to get it without being fucked by it.
What differentiates smaller media is that we don’t have to pretend that things are normal. It’s larger outlets, such as east coast newspapers, that have to maintain the fantasy that there’s nothing fucked up about it at all, that they’re not playing Trump Traffic.
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I don’t know. I think you exaggerate the stupidity of the average American. I know he richly mined the “don’t trust the media” meme, but I have to hope that if everything he claims is eventually revealed to be false, there will be a cumulative effect that he is untrustworthy will penetrate to all but the most obtuse.
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The headline was as follows:
Drumpf praises self for 'bringing back’ 5,000 Sprint jobs to U.S., says Softbank’s Son assisted
Note the scare quotes, which I recall being there originally.
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Not entirely true, you can read The New Yorker or The Nation or Mother Jones or many other sources, that are often significantly less screwed-up than the mainstream media. Heck, even WashPo has been doing pretty good, going after Trump hard.
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Don’t matter hardly none.
People don’t listen to the clean-up crew.
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Pretty much everything at Boing Boing is nakedly opinionated. If you expect the “voice from nowhere” from us, the objectivity of the AP style applied consistently, etc, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place.
If you want that voice, well, God help you.
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