***Official Political Discussion Thread***


NBC really slighted Tamron bae for this?
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https://www.vox.com/2018/10/23/18004478/hack-gap-explained

The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politics
Republicans have a huge strategic advantage in shaping the news.

The reason is something I’ve dubbed “the hack gap” over the years, and it’s one of the most fundamental asymmetries shaping American politics. While conservatives obsess over the (accurate) observation that the average straight news reporter has policy views that are closer to the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, the hack gap fundamentally does more to structure political discourse.

The hack gap explains why Clinton’s email server received more television news coverage than all policy issues combined in the 2016 election. It explains why Republicans can hope to get away with dishonest spin about preexisting conditions. It’s why Democrats are terrified that Elizabeth Warren’s past statements about Native American heritage could be general election poison in 2020, and it’s why an internecine debate about civility has been roiling progressive circles for nearly two years even while the president of the United States openly praises assaulting journalists.

The hack gap has two core pillars. One is the constellation of conservative media outlets — led by Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also including Sinclair Broadcasting in local television, much of AM talk radio, and new media offerings such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller — that simply abjure anything resembling journalism in favor of propaganda.

The other is that the self-consciousness journalists at legacy outlets have about accusations of liberal bias leads them to bend over backward to allow the leading conservative gripes of the day to dominate the news agenda. Television producers who would never dream of assigning segments where talking heads debate whether it’s bad that the richest country on earth also has millions of children growing up in dire poverty think nothing of chasing random conservative shiny objects, from “Fast & Furious” (remember that one?) to Benghazi to the migrant caravan.

And more than Citizens United or even gerrymandering, it’s a huge constant thumb on the scale in favor of the political right in America.

The hack gap, explained
The essence of the Clinton email scandal wasn’t the claim that she’d done something wrong — everyone, including Clinton herself, agreed that it was inappropriate to violate State Department email policy and that she should not have done that.

The essence was, rather, the bizarre and obviously false claim that the Clinton email scandal was important.

But, of course, the only reason the email controversy so thoroughly dominated perceptions of Clinton was it dominated coverage of Clinton — coverage that was justified with reference to its importance in driving perception.

You can tell that it wasn’t actually important because the people most invested in pretending it was important — Republicans — clearly do not actually think government email protocol or Freedom of Information Act compliance are important issues. Have you seen any Fox News segments about email protocol adherence or Freedom of Information Act compliance in the Trump administration? Have congressional Republicans held any hearings about the subject? Have muckraking right-wingers launched any investigations? Of course not.

When the New York Times reported that Trump White House staffers were using personal email accounts, the conservative movement shrugged. When Trump’s use of an insecure cellphone for sensitive communications was revealed, Congress didn’t care.

Conservative propaganda television matters

Sinclair doesn’t follow journalistic norms for the very good reason that its strategy wasn’t designed by a journalist, similar to how the architect of Fox News, Roger Ailes, came to cable news from a background as a communications strategist for Richard Nixon rather than a journalist.

And it shows. Research from Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.


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This has been pointed out multiple times in this thread, and it is the object of many lefties' frustration with the Democratic party. The last line is one element of the Republican game that I feel Democrats are ignoring, even though it is the most effective weapon the Right has: propaganda masked as "local news" diffused nightly on channels accessible over the air.

You don't beat propaganda with appeals to reason. You beat it with counter-propaganda.

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This basic cycle played out time and again in the 2016 campaign when Clinton’s effort to reach out to Republicans alienated by Trump’s bizarre behavior was inevitably met with a progressive backlash that, in turn, required her campaign to reiterate the inconvenient reality that she was actually running on a very progressive platform that lifelong Republicans wouldn’t like very much. She benefited, as all politicians of both parties do, from some ideologically sympathetic media coverage.

But Trump had — and has — at his disposal something that Democrats simply don’t: organized, systematic propaganda broadcasters. Fox, Sinclair, and much of the rest of conservative media simply do not exist to inform a conservative audience about what Republican Party politicians are up to and how it conforms to the tenets of conservative ideology or the preferences of Republican Party voters. Aware that cultural issues unite the GOP base while economic issues divide it, Fox and its cohorts fan the culture war flames while papering over — and often actively misleading about — the nature of the concrete Republican policy agenda.
 
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018...mits-trump-is-lying-to-manipulate-voters.html

Republican candidates throughout the country are campaigning on their support for preserving the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. And yet, most of those candidates have used the power of their public offices to eliminate those protections, through either legislation or litigation (in fact, some are using their power to that end right now, at the very same moment that they’re assuring voters of their deep commitment to guaranteeing affordable insulin to diabetics). The dissonance here isn’t a product of an “evolution” or a “flip-flop.” The GOP has not changed its actual position on the issue in question. In recent weeks, Senate Republicans have sought to burnish their candidates’ claims to moderation on health care by publicizing a bill that would require insurers to offer coverage to everyone — but that would also abolish restrictions on how much companies can charge people with preexisting conditions for their coverage. Which is to say, the bill guarantees affordable coverage for rich people with serious medical problems, while abandoning the rest to their fates.

Over the past week, the Republican president has begun campaigning on “a pure 10 percent” tax cut targeted exclusively at “middle-income” Americans — one that the White House has “been working on for a few months” and is set to pass before the midterm elections.

Which is to say: The president is campaigning on a tax plan that does not exist.


If Republicans believed that they could win elections by giving voters an accurate picture of their position on tax policy, then they would be campaigning on the tax cuts that they actually passed — which is to say, on their success at providing wealthy shareholders with a large, permanent tax cut, and middle-class people with a modest, temporary one. But they know that they can’t, so they aren’t.

:smh::smh:


:smh::smh: What happened to the police? Oh yeah, she probably doesn't pay taxes where the lake house is located...

 
MIgrants are gonna to go Northern Minnesota? :lol:

This reminds me of what @sfc415 used to say about white people when he used to go to the Midwest.

Actually I think there are areas that you wouldn't expect with large immigrant populations. We have that here too - you expect large cities with already significant ethnic populations to be like that - but then there are small towns in the middle of nowhere that suddenly have 25% Polish/Indian/Bulgarian.. people - and actually it seems to work well, they just become members of that society and are accepted and popular.
 
This bomb stuff is crazy. People need to relax and stop thinking that the other side has nothing to offer. Most people who are into politics have good intentions.
 
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