Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do -- Rebecca Solnit

[tenderfoot]

"The media might be the simplest to describe. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

[ananda]

1. seriously excellent analysis!

Thank you

[robbob]

2. The media is doing it still

It’s sickening to turn on CNN and watch panel after panel of “concerned experts” debating what the Dem’s did wrong. I haven’t heard a single pundit discuss the media’s role in normalizing tRump. It’s going to get worse over the next 4 years, and beyond. The free press in America is dead.