Wednesday, February 05, 2020

"Transgressive" is defined by the keeper of the narrative

I know, I usually start the post with a tweet that is the basis of the post.  Not this time.  A picture is still worth a thousand words, and the article I want you to read is worth a few minutes of your time, even without pictures.
I would start where Mr. Froomkin started, with a comparison of the coverage of the SOTU by NYTimes and WaPo:  it is a profoundly revealing analysis.  But drift down the article to the television coverage, which Mr. Froomkin rightly describes as showing "how widely entertainment values have subsumed news values in their milieu, and how susceptible that makes them to even the crassest displays of reality-TV drama."  And he gives concrete examples in their own words:

Wow.  Cheerlead much?

Jay Rosen is being critical of CNN's coverage, if you can't immediately tell from context.

As Mr. Froomkin sums up, and as I've said before of reporting, the narrative is all:

For many reporters, the easy way out was to put Trump’s words in the context of — as the Associated Press’s Jonathan Lemire put it — “partisan discord.”
You can read his further examples at his article. Narrative can never be allowed to get in the way of the facts, facts such as the actual content of the speech.  Froomkin comes around to the actual content of the speech, the one Nancy Pelosi ostentatiously ripped up, and here we get back to the opening image:

When a president delivers a speech full of lies, that ought to be the big news. But instead, as usual, almost all of that was relegated to the fact-checks. Fact-checking this one wasn’t hard. As Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Sarah Cahlan wrote for the Washington Post: “Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them.” 
I've quit reading the fact-checks because I assume (correctly, it always turns out) that every word the President says is a lie; a gross exaggeration; or an outright fabrication with no basis in reality at all.  Frankly, by now, the burden of proof should have shifted from the press to the President; but somehow, it still hasn't.  We don't even blink when he does things like this:

Pretty much everyone I saw whiffed on properly covering the single most divisive moment of the night: the awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to hate-radio host Rush Limbaugh (who feigned surprise.)
I haven't seen anything written about it, and c'mon, Trump announced earlier that day what he was gonna do.  The only surprise was the venue in which he did it.  And yet, despite trying to pump up the ratings, the audience still fell by 21% from last year's SOTU.  Still, a Medal of Freedom?  To Rush Limbaugh?  For anything other than purely partisan political reasons?  And the press response is:  *crickets*?  This was not a grosser violation of the whole premise of that award than Nancy Pelosi shredding paper?


And still nobody remembers the NFL quarterbacks comment that sent Limbaugh back to radio permanently.  Ah, well; Mr. Froomkin gets the last word because it's a deserving one:

That’s why, although Nancy Pelosi’s public display of contempt for Trump’s speech was actually one of the least outrageous things that happened Tuesday night, I think the media’s obsessive focus on her is kind of healthy.

Pelosi decided the whole thing was abnormal enough that she did something overtly transgressive.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)