This weekend the press industry in this country has been in full pitchforks-and-torches mode regarding the speech Donald Trump gave on Saturday. Just like those imbalanced villagers portrayed in films the hysterical fervor kicked up in the press was all emotional outrage and ignoring core facts. In a segment of his speech Trump was addressing problems looming for the automobile corporations and the threat China poses with impending manufacturing in Mexico.
"We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line [the Mexican border], and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it […] It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories."
It is very clear to anyone that this entire portion of his speech was economic in nature, centered on the auto industry, but speaking to the broader threats to our economy. The press however saw an opportunity. His truncated quote - “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” spread like a locust swarm in the press, with interpretations that Trump was threatening a January 6-level of violence nationwide.
This was a lie not contained to a few outlets, possibly sharing a misrepresentation unintentionally. It was a true coordinated attack. NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Associated Press, Politico, NPR, PBS, USA Today, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Daily News, The Hill, and numerous other outlets of varying import all got into the act. (Amusingly Yahoo was precious, suggesting the press needed to “wake up” to the comments, as if the media were not already resembling a kicked over ant hill.)
There is so much wrong taking place. Obviously, there is the clear intent to misrepresent Trump’s quote. Secondly, this is the news industry playing Media Myna birds and repeating the talking points of the administration. You expect the Biden campaign to leap at politicizing this - it is entirely expected. But this wholesale coverage of that approach is deeply disturbing, especially when his full quote displays clearly what he was saying.
Even those suggesting he was talking about the economy, but chose his words poorly, this ignores the core concept he was using. “Bloodbath” used in reference to financial calamity is so widely accepted that it appears in the dictionary as defined common parlance.
That is such a basic economic term that it appears in the dictionary.
— Brad Slager: Flips On The Highbeams In Fog Of War (@MartiniShark) March 18, 2024
But facts and definitions do not serve the narrative, so those get tossed aside. https://t.co/z1WvsUbw0C pic.twitter.com/3QcZxDIrSL
Then, just to underscore how this cynical and disingenuous hair pulling and fainting couch tremulous wailing is faked, look at what was reported just one week ago. Many of these same outlets - Politico, The Guardian, MSNBC, Newsweek, Yahoo - and more, used that very same word to describe the mass firings at the Republican National Convention. So they are not so squeamish about that term.
This continues the mounting trend seen for months now. It has long been a common practice in the news for deeply similar reports to arrive in unison, where an administration talking point paper or a directive from Media Matters was clearly delivered. But things have become more serious of late. This is no longer just a handful of news outlets with similar reports; there is widespread uniformity across the media landscape.
Back in November a flood of outlets joined up to say Trump was invoking Nazi terminology in using the word “vermin” during a speech. Every single report was matching in declaring he referenced “his political opponents”. The issue was Trump, in his broader quote, referred to those who hate America, such as Marxists and fascists. (This meant Trump was basically Hitler for calling Nazis vermin.) Last month the Robert Hur report had all of the press raging at the prosecutor for calling Biden old and enfeebled. That the diagnosis was the reason for not prosecuting the president was secondary to the frothing at the mouth outrage.
Recently it was seen after the State of the Union, when Biden’s angry hour-long tirade was getting negative reviews. The next day dozens of news organizations interestingly had the exact same word used to describe the speech. It was embarrassingly obvious what was playing out, and they cared little about how this looked. Now today they are all making the same lying accusation about Trump’s quote.
While this is not a novel practice, we can see a change of sorts. What is newly disturbing about these unified falsehood attacks is the sheer size of the participation. It is not one news syndicate reporting thusly and then it is reposted by some outlets. This has become a team effort, and the size of the outlets participating and the scope of those on board is the disturbing aspect. That this latest example was a report so ridiculous it was disproven almost instantly makes it all the more revealing. They did not care.
The question therefore becomes, “Why?” Why did so many news outlets join in with this laughably poor effort? In a word, it has to be “desperation”. The growingly repetitive instances, the widespread participation seen (and by the largest of news outlets), combined with the lack of genuine content in the process reveals a press corps that realizes Biden is sliding from relevancy and that a Trump victory in November is growing more likely. The press must see some internal numbers that are truly jarring to them.
These shallow group attacks are salvos being launched in a last ditch effort to sway things. That the articles and reports are vacant of the charges is inconsequential; they want to generate the headlines and hope only those are shared. Political sycophants can then make a collage of the headlines to show all of the “evidence” against Trump. It is a media version of the court cases brought against Trump by the Biden legal agencies, where they just stack up frivolous accusations and prosecutions so it can be said, “Trump is four times indicted with over 90 charges against him!!!”
Yes, desperation. By now this is not simply a blatant example of our media being coordinated for one side, it is a brazen one. It is becoming to the point that the press does not care that they are exposed in following this gameplan. What we are seeing by this point going into the election with both party candidates established is collusion, and with it comes a dark irony.
This practice has been in place for some time, and the general public is walking away from this slanted partisanship. Over the past couple of years the news industry has been rocked, layoffs are announced on a near daily basis, and outlets are shuttering on a regular basis. What is taking place in media circles right now is the true bloodbath.
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