The problem with ignoring and shunning the blatant liars is that there’s so many of them, and they’ll vote in droves in the next election after spending the next 2 years in their warped media bubble.
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Over the years I’ve noticed how an appetite for scandal creates an environment that evolves better liars. As Oppo research gets better, candidates are called on to address all kinds if bullshit that has nothing to do with the jobs they interview for. Voters and the press eat this up, and each generation of candidates that survive are slipperier and less concerned with relevancy than the last.
If you want to avoid breeding superbugs, you gotta attend to the environment in which they breed.
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Acosta’s job is to report Trump’s dumb statement, not interpret it.
If Trump says, “Brown people are criminals,” is a journalist’s job to simply write a headline, “BROWN PEOPLE ARE CRIMINALS, TRUMP SAYS.”? Too often, that’s exactly what happens. But do you really think that’s all a journalist should do? I don’t understand, at all, why you would oppose interpretation, nuance, and pointing out factual inaccuracies in journalism.
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He probably thinks that the press is (are?) the enemy of the people…
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PSA: Flossie still makes more sense than that person claiming to be a journalist upthread.
And @anon61833566, I can’t express the feelings our account causes.
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BTW: does anyone know the original source of the phrase “speaking truth to power”?
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Watching the ease with which conservatives pretend to believe something they clearly cannot believe — that Acosta did anything wrong — should really be a moment to think about what other beliefs they only pretend to hold.
My (least) favorite one of these, is how they pretend the second amendment is the sum total of legal theory regarding gun control, no amount of federal law or judicial interpreatation can influence their stubbornness.
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Always heard it was these dudes, but wikipedia names a lot of different sources… 
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“Two, they’re trolling. “Triggering the libs” is the meats and potatoes of their political ideology these days (read my book, Troll Nation). Telling blatant lies and watching liberals make themselves crazy insisting on “facts” and “evidence” makes them laugh in delight.”
Exactly. Remember that scene in Splash? Where the two local yokels were peeing down the smart ass diver’s air hose?
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At least we’re talking about being a sane asshole. Hopefully sipping very good bourbon alone, thanks to all the money saved by neither traveling to visit unbearable family nor buying them gifts.
Exactly. It is more important to these types to signal allegiance to their ideological tribe than to their biological tribe.
In other words: they REALLY DO cling to political correctness, but only their political correctness is actually correct.
More like Two Scoops thinks that the press is his enemy because they don’t do what he tells them. And because he also thinks “l’etat, c’est moi” (or would think that, if he could speak French and could hold a thought about European history in his head long enough to enunciate it), the press is therefore the “enemy of the people”.
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And scene.
A magnificent channeling of a Trump supporter.
I’m worried about your health!
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Journalism is ideally supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Sometimes that requires getting in there and demanding actual answers.
It would be so much easier if being nice and polite and trying to shame Trump into actually being accountable for his words was a strategy that worked. Unfortunately, politeness doesn’t tend to work on trolls and bullies. From all we’ve seen the only way to actually get an answer out of him is to apply pressure. And then follow up on how his last answer is completely incompatible with other things he’s said.
We the people aren’t there to ask Trump the hard questions. That’s the press’ job. And if they are only going to be polite and nice and not push back and not demand answers, then that’s not being journalists. That’s being stenographers.
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Gifted to me by a dear friend, who has a family far crazier (and regrettably, far deader) than mine.
But flaming liberals the lot of them, goddammit!
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This really sums up a lot of the problems with American politics:
The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy
million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a
cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if
someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal,
whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow
to put on it. - Davis X. Machina, balloon-juice.com
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Of the 5 reasons, the first one is the most important: tribalism. It is what also explains why they vote against their own interests: the interests of the tribe is stronger. The way to enforce that, as noted by some people in this very thread, is that if you don’t support the tribe, you will alienate your family and friends.
It is a classic manipulation trick, historically documented in religions and cults. Nobody is immune to it.
What should worry us is that the Internet as made this kind of manipulation both covert and possible on a large scale by automatic systems.
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Swallow your pride and wash it down with some of this stuff. Might even make certain unpalatable but necessary medicines, like $15/hour federal minimum wage or making election day a bank holiday, go down more easily, too.
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