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Saturday, December 17, 2016

They Ask Questions

Steve asks rhetorically:
Will media dupes ever stop predicting that Trump might govern as a non-conservative?
And of course the answer is no, and of course we all know it. There will always be some professional journamalists out there who need to occupy column inches and/or time in the sainted 24-hour news cycle.

When we plaintively ask what's wrong with the media, this is really the main part of the problem -- the incessant need to fill, constantly, relentlessly, with less and less quality control. The sad and hilarious irony of it all is that the corporate media monkeys keep genuflecting faster and more furiously to the wingnuts douchebags who don't even read them anyway, who show up only to troll and lob impotent threats from the comfort of their couches. Meanwhile, they betray the people who actually do read their reporting and analyses every time they do shit like that.

All real journalism, excepting feel-good kitten-in-a-tree Bart's people type schtick, should boil down to one of two things:
  1. Objective reporting of facts and events -- what was done and said, and by whom. Statements that are factually inaccurate should be pointed out; statements that have already been corrected and are still stated as before are called lies.
  2. Objective opinions based on facts and evidence at hand, in order to analyze and synthesize the confluence of events and people that occur on a regular basis. There is generally some assumption or expectation of expertise, or at least a higher-than-average level of knowledge about the subject(s) being discussed.
These are modest definitional expectations, and more and more the "media" collectively fail to meet even that bar. Robert Frank's piece that Steve is responding to in the link is basically a textbook version of the "contrarian" clickbait one sees a startling prevalence of these days. Frank seems to be pinning his analysis, such as it is, on past vagaries of Clownstick seeming somewhat "liberal" on some issues (for example, not being a homo-crucifying closet-case fundie, woo-hoo!).

But Clownstick has never indicated any clear opinion on any major national policy issue, if you look back. He feints and bobs and weaves and head-fakes, but aside from wanting to machine-gun the so-called Central Park Five into a mass grave in Central Park and plop a monument to himself over it, he's never really been definitive about much of anything at all. Clownstick's defining characteristic is a sincere belief that he is smarter and better than everyone else, that he's the biggest swinging dick in the room simply because he repeats that he is over and over until the dullards start to believe it. Again, though, no policy opinions or details, on anything, certainly not on the health care system.

As Steve points out, there is absolutely no reason, based on Clownstick's recent history as a campaigner either, and certainly not with his prospective appointments so far, to even speculate that he might be planning to "innovate" the health-care system in any way that would help the most vulnerable. And since it seriously appears that Clownstick does not even read anything that isn't about him, it's entirely likely that he doesn't even know anything about what a clusterfuck of collusion the health-care system is in this country.

And since he's nothing but a cheap two-bit grifter who lives for fleecing suckers and fools, it's pretty much a slam-dunk guarantee that if someone had the time and patience to explain to him how the health-care racket works, Clownstick's only question would be how to get in on some of that for himself.