OK, here’s what I think…
It’s no secret that most news outlets that do actual reporting are in trouble financially.
News has become nearly indistinguishable from entertainment.
Nearly all news is brought to US citizens by multinational corporations.
These corporations need advertising (from other corporations, natch) to survive.
Advertisers demand eyeballs. Ad rates depend on circulation/viewership.
Therefore news outlets must attract eyeballs to survive.
The public is tired of Benghazi and emails and Clinton investigations in general. So last year!
Mass media needs a shiny new object to attract eyeballs.
In the short run, Trump will fulfill that role extremely well — the public is avid to see which lunatics get cabinet positions, not to mention interest in Trump’s upcoming lawsuits. The current demonstrations against Trump are icing on the cake, especially if they turn violent.
But that’s just the appetizer.
What kind of event is guaranteed to increase the consumption of news?
Hint: Remember the Maine?
The Spanish–American War (April–August 1898) is considered to be both a turning point in the history of propaganda and the beginning of the practice of yellow journalism.
It was the first conflict in which military action was precipitated by media involvement.
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Several forces within the United States were pushing for a war with Spain. Their tactics were wide-ranging and their goal was to engage the opinion of the American people in any way possible. Men such as William Hearst, the owner of The New York Journal was involved in a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and saw the conflict as a way to sell papers.
Who can doubt that we are much likelier to go to war under a President Trump than a President Clinton?
Which explains the enormous thumbs mass media pressed on the scales of media coverage in the last year. Sure, the GOP played into their hands with endless Benghazi and email hearings, which was spun by the media as a necessary investigation for the good of the country. The mass media could have mentioned the amount of time and money wasted on a witch hunt that went nowhere. Or reminded the American people that the State Department server that Hilary was supposed to use actually was hacked www.reuters.com/.... But no, mass media trumpeted the GOP party line from start to finish: Hilary’s arrogance and duplicity put Americans in danger.
Since last winter, it’s been impossible to find any mention of Hilary in the mass media that did not include the word “scandal”.
There are two Golden Rules of propaganda:
1. People need a lot of repetition to absorb information, all the more so if it’s not true.
2. People are likelier to believe what you’re saying if it’s what they want to hear.
So by election day, (1) the vast majority of Low Information Voters (which are of course the vast majority of voters) had been thoroughly convinced that Hilary was greedy, careless, dishonest and completely untrustworthy. If they were impressed by her platform or her performance in the debate, it was just further proof of how sneaky she was about misleading us.
Add this to the undeniable fact (2) that white people who can’t get good jobs prefer to believe that this is the fault of immigration or brown people or Washington elites or Obamacare. That’s much more palatable to them than their own lack of education and work ethic, or the undeniable fact that the states with the worst-performing economies are the ones that elected Republicans to public office.
Of course, voter suppression in many of those states didn’t help.
Now look at the mass media treatment of Trump. Sure, they had a field day with his pussy-grabbing tape and other accusations of sexual harassment. They mentioned Trump University, the bankruptcies, his failure to disclose his taxes, his outsourcing of manufacturing his clothing and his insourcing of foreign workers to build his towers and then staff them. But that coverage was superficial, in part because there were so many Trump scandals that not much time was spent on each one. But did you notice that they were never called scandals? We never heard “another Trump scandal” as we did with Clinton, to rub it in that it’s a pattern.
We heard more bad stuff about the Clinton foundation than we did about the Trump foundation, which is like taking a skinned knee more seriously than cancer.
Now the media is being downright servile to Trump. Half of the panel vetting new members of his administration are members of his family. The same members of his family that will be running his business empire while he’s President, to — you know — avoid conflicts of interest. Both of these maneuvers are unprecedented in modern history. But if you read or listen to the news, it’s totally OK — no mention of “scandal”.
So I have concluded that our fine “independent press” has brainwashed the American people into voting for an unqualified candidate who is guaranteed to increase their circulation. With any luck he’ll drive us into a full-scale war! The fact they he and his GOP Congress will certainly reduce their corporate taxes is just gravy.
