Credit: Salon
This past Thursday, at a rally in North Carolina, Donald Trump reacted to the forcible ejection of a protester by issuing an odd and ominous complaint. “It’s always like one person,” he observed. “Can’t we have a little more action than this?”
The next night, Trump got his wish. Thousands of protesters crashed his rally in downtown Chicago, seeking to exercise their right to peaceable assembly and free speech. Rather suddenly, Trump the Bully morphed into Trump the Chickenhawk. He abruptly canceled the event, leaving his supporters and protesters to wander the arena and surrounding area.
What ensued was—given the animus between Trump supporters and protesters—a remarkably civil dispersion of more than 10,000 people. There was lots of chanting and a few shoving matches. Four people suffered minor injuries, five were arrested, one of them a reporter.
But if you watched coverage of the event—every major cable network offered hours—what you saw was an endless tape loop of the same four scuffles. This had the effect of making the event look far more violent and […]
This article seems a bit facile. To use Walt (Pogo) Kelly’s oft-used line, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Should we really single out the “infotainment” part of media for the lowering of politics in 2016 to a test of the maxim that there’s no such thing as bad PR? Would Trump’s treatment matter if he wasn’t so successful with voters? Is it not also the limits put on political discourse – it’s been strangled and is gasping for air in the bath tub – that is at work here, too? This is much more complex of a problem than covering a man biting a dog.
True ,the problem is manifold. But you must admit the correspondence that years of Newsertainment results in the parade being lead by a game show host. The deeper problem is mass citizen abdication of funding a ‘free’ press. They think free means ‘no charge’.
This happened when the display advertising model which included general interest was eclipsed by google’s intentional advertising that addresses your specific needs by the cookies you dangle on your bowser. The funding model of the press was thus broken, and without an actual press, democracy is flying blind and will fail. George Orwell said”Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed, everything else is public relations. QED