Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/31/tom-the-dancing-bug-one-day-on-the-rio-grande.html
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Yertle is emblematic of his party establishment: professing his loathing of von Clownstick, yet bending over again and again to accommodate him.
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The paper towels!
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It only took 9 panels to perfectly illustrate how fucked up the GOP is.
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Political theater in lieu of doing their jobs all the while killing people.
The worst fascist improve.
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How is our media press so bad that this could work?
I get the GOP plan, keep the problem bad, campaign that only they can solve it. All messaging, no action at all. When in power, no messaging and no action.
What I don’t understand is how the media today can just keep repeating their messaging with no context, no thought, no reporting at all about how they’re not only not taking any action, they’re actively preventing any action from being taken.
The reporting should be so amazingly simple to report on the accurate facts that they’re purposefully keeping the problem bad to completely negate the strategy.
Yet, I fully expect hours and months of reporting just repeating the GOP talking points verbatim.
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Because it’s corporate and for-profit… the ratings matter, not the story and not getting the facts out to the public.
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“You’re welcome!” -Sinclair Broadcast Group
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It still boggles me that these are in conflict.
If the TV Weather was reported this way, nobody would watch it and the ratings would be horrible.
I understand the “access reporting” and how showing someone is ridiculous can lose access to them. What I don’t understand is how that is worse ratings than pointing out the absurdity. Along with why someone would desire keeping access to someone who is always ridiculous.
I prefer our local ABC station weather verses the other options. However, you can always tell when the Sinclair propaganda national piece done as a local comes on and it makes me mad every single time.
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Panel 3 was sufficient.
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It really shouldn’t, though. Corporations are always going to prioritize profits over anything else. That’s their entire reason for existence, honestly speaking. There used to be greater diversity in who owned stations, and there were rules that regulated ownership in particular markets, but that’s all gone out the window now, and corporations (especially those owned by right wing assholes) have been buying up struggling local papers all across the country. Those especially have an ideology that they’re working to implement in order to push out narratives that are favorable to them. It makes sense if you view it through a Gramscian lens, that the ruling class is always going to seek to impose it’s ideology on all of society, often via mass media.
Really, in terms of mainstream media, the best your going to get is something like NPR/PBS, but even there, corporations are often major underwriters of many local stations. And the far right has been gunning for the tiny sliver of federal funding for NPR/PBS for years now.
Because far too much of the news media is corporate infotainment, not actual news…
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I wish every Republican member of congress were asked “who would Jesus allow to drown?”
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They’d say “Democrats”.
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Politely disagree.
My parents, and my wife’s mother and grandmother, were addicted to the weather channel. It didn’t really matter that they could look outside the window in January and see that it was snowing, they wanted to know the possibilities of a blizzard, a sudden warm snap, some kind of ice disaster, or whatever. It was pure entertainment.
I think there’s definitely a generation or two of TV viewers who would watch absolute made-up nonsense about the weather, if it was exciting enough.
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It’s a fight for margins. They’ve set themselves up to fight day by day for eyeballs. Line must go up.
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That’s not the same though. Those things were all based on reality and what was coming. Sure, there was some probability in there, and it wasn’t always 100% right, but they didn’t try to hide that or say it was always definitely going to happen. Knowing what is coming, or what might come depending on how stuff shifts and then one of those options actually happens is useful. In recent years, there’s definitely some entertainment bump to it, but it’s still fact based.
If the Weather was reported like politics. They would report with a straight face that Big Shovel Company is saying there will be a foot of snow in June (North America) and that everyone should seriously consider getting new shovels to deal with the imminent snow coming any day now. Because they know reporting on blizzards drives high ratings. Just ignore that it’s June and there is not a blizzard coming, someone just said there is and we’re just going to repeat that for the ratings.
Something like the Weather Channel augmented reality set that shows what high water storm surge looks like. They pull that out when there’s a hurricane or super storm. I’m sure it get’s good ratings. It’s entertaining and done well. If they dragged that out every day for every forecast from quarter inch of rain to partly cloudy instead of only when an actual storm is coming. People would certainly stop watching that.
I agree that entertaining weather reports will get better ratings than boring reports. But, if they’re not accurate (at least plausible and accurate enough), then people wouldn’t watch them.
People will watch Ice Road Truckers for the entertainment. People will not watch you tell them their commute will be just like Ice Road Truckers when it’s 70 and sunny.
And yet, we all know what is up with this nonsense…
…huh?
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My grandmother and a couple of my aunts would start a fuckin email chain that could disrupt internet…
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