The way this is written normalizes something not normal: It’s describing the President as narcissistic and juvenile—but in a tone and words that would imply it is perfectly normal. https://t.co/vGGGV5Ghbv— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) August 10, 2019
I gotta say, I don't depend that much on "tone" in news reporting to decide what I think about what is reported. Chuck Todd (per Raw Story earlier; find the link yourself!) was "astounded" that so many Democratic candidates were calling the sitting President a white supremacist. I'm still just surprised it took them so long to publicly acknowledge the obvious.
I read this tweet earlier, and what I took from it is that this is "normal" for Trump, under whose occupation of the office nothing is or should be considered normal. It does describe the President as narcissistic and juvenile; but it's rather patronizing to think the reader can't figure that out without the journalist shouting THIS IS NOT NORMAL THIS IS NOT NORMAL THIS IS NOT NORMAL!!!!!!!!!
I mean, there is still a difference between the news page and the editorial page. Unless we want to go back to the days of newspapers written for one point of view and only that point of view. But I thought that was the problem with FoxNews......
It's a matter of habituation. This has been building since the time of, at least, Reagan when the media normalized an ignorant, often deluded president who, it became clearer as time went on, couldn't distinguish between what he saw in movies and reality. That, unfortunately, could be said of a large percentage of Americans, quite a few of them holding positions as journalists, "opinion journalism" perhaps only a bit more than supposed reporters of fact.
ReplyDeleteThe economist fad flowing, I believe, out of the University of Chicago during Milton Friedman's time, that "consumers" are rational agents was an excuse for permitting crooks to swindle and cheat and rob people in an unregulated market. I've come to the conclusion that the delusion that people will automatically choose facts and the truth over attractively packaged lies in an unregulated media is an even greater delusion, one with a long, long history of disconfirmatory evidence. The idea that the adoption of truth is something like a natural, unintentional process having nothing to do with volition or human manipulation like gravitational attraction or chemical bonding is absurd. I suspect it is one of the more absurd ideas that flow from the enlightenment - which I have come to believe was an ill considered extension of reliance on science way past what was warranted by its possibilities and achievements. The idea that because things are too complex to really apply scientific analysis to, such as human behavior and the phenomena of society, that they MUST still follow the kind of simple regularities that science could follow, was the callowest of faith holdings of materialism, scientism and atheism. I think in this aspect of contemporary journalism, we might be seeing that folly in action.