Sunday, November 13, 2022

Post Mortems

NYT Pitchbot is satire (which I guess is not parody? Who knew Elmo was so subtle?). This is real: Shorter JMM: it’s still all about the horse race. At least for political media. Because “implementation” is policy is disagreement and opinion (“Are these things right or wrong?”). The horse race is simple objective fact (who won, who lost, and how much was spent?). In the end it has bugger all to do with the rest of government, but it’s the path of least resistance.

And then again, the GOP wasn’t promising much implementation this time around. Lots of fear (“CRIME! BROWN PEOPLE AT THE BORDER!”) and promises of  fighting (“HUNTER BIDEN! IMPEACH BIDEN!! IMPEACH EVERYBODY!!!”). Executing vendettas is not the same as executing policy.

So there’s that, too.

1 comment:

  1. The media should understand the perils of trying to predict the results in a horse race and politics is never as neatly settled as a horse race. I think things went seriously wrong when they made the movie of All the Presidents Men and affluent kids who shouldn't have been in college because they had no serious interests in studying decided they were going to be Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It's been downhill from there. There and 1970s show-biz happy talk started the headlong pitch into the abyss of what "journalism" has become.

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