As Maggie Haberman Unabashedly Joins the Kayfabe, Tim Walz Sings the Menards Jingle
Sunday marked the 1/3 mark for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign (36 of 107 days). Yesterday, she announced her first sit-down interview (with Dana Bash, whom I consider a poor choice); the media hounds are already wailing that, like interviews Barack Obama did with Joe Biden, Mitt Romney did with Paul Ryan, and Trump did with Mike Pence, the Vice President will do the interview with her own VP nominee.
By comparison, Sunday marked the 9/10 mark for Trump’s presidential campaign (650 of 720 days).
Meanwhile, there are a slew of question to which media hounds have not bothered to demand answers from Trump:
- Will he hire his failspawn to work in White House again?
- What is Trump’s business relationship with Emiratis and Saudis?
- Where are his tax returns?
- Did Trump get $10 million from Egypt to stay in 2016 race?
- Where are the missing classified documents?
- What did Putin say in Helsinki?
- Did Trump have an overt quid pro quo on the Stone, Bannon, and Manafort pardons?
- How much of his campaign donations has he spent on legal defense?
- How and (why?!?!) does Trump plan to implement his plan of mass deportation?
In the wake of the DNC, there have been some really good critiques of the media’s failure. Asawin Suebsaeng mocked at the “mollycoddled hogs” who bitched about their own access while bemoaning that of influencers, the bloggers of 2024.
Much of what I witnessed and heard about during my time in Chicago reinforced my preexisting beliefs that far too many so-called elite members of my profession — national political media scribes who fancy themselves as speaking truth to power, but more often just speak words to financially destructive Google algorithms — are mollycoddled hogs who are doing everything they can to fail to meet the enormity of this moment.
Like Suebsaeng, Will Bunch grieved the way journalists were blowing this most important election. He cited three examples:
- Axios’ Alex Thompson laundering a right wing smears about a typo Tim Walz’ campaign made in 2006 just like he laundered right wing smears about Hunter Biden with little notice from Democrats
- Rich Lowry’s argument that if Trump repeats a lie over and over — like his 2016 claim that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it — that would amount to “character” that might launch him to victory
- Various “fact checks” that discount direct quotations of Trump’s comments because he later reneged on those quotes
Citing Mark Jacobs, Bunch also flipped Suebsaeng’s focus on mainstream gripes about influencer access. Bunch laid out how, in significant part because of declining trust in mainstream media, those influencers are actually the best route for Kamala Harris to reach voters, particularly the ones who can make the difference in the election.
Jacob has harsh words for how reporters have covered the race, writing that “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.” But he also notes that traditional media can’t figure out how to compete for young eyeballs against sites like edgy and fast-paced TikTok. Jacob pointed out that public faith in mass media has plunged from 72% in 1976, after Watergate, to just 32% today.
You know who gets the new landscape better than anyone else? Kamala Harris.
The vice president and Democratic nominee is running to be America’s first post-media president. In Chicago, much was made of the fact that Team Harris and the Democrats invited 200 sometimes fawning internet “content creators” who got VIP treatment while mainstream journalists fought over nosebleed-level seats and refrained from eating or going to the bathroom for fear of losing them.
I would add several comments about the real tensions between mainstream reporters and influencers.
First, these discussions of tensions between influencers and journalists have ignored what has happened among right wing media in the last decade– during which time people who would have formerly been called “influencers” (or, more accurately, trolls) have become mainstream, including even former shitty blogger JD Vance. What Harris has done by welcoming these influencers was to foster a progressive media infrastructure akin to the one Barack Obama largely let collapse after his win. If Democrats are lucky, in a matter of years, influencers will be able to feed lazy hacks like Alex Thompson stories that he’ll package up and DC insiders will imagine that amounts to journalism. Until then, they may be able to magnify genuine right wing scandals that the media otherwise ignores. One source of the double standard with which mainstream media has always treated Trump, for example, is this pressure from the right, which really does dictate a lot of press coverage (and which, the Douglass Mackey exhibits showed, those trolls explicitly set out to do as early as 2015).
Second, one thing few people have — still! — accounted for is the degree to which Trump has never been asked to explain policy, allowing him to instead coast on the goodwill and trust accrued over decades of appearing in people’s living room as a TV star. The imagined authenticity that Trump — still! — wields from that gives him an enormous advantage.
To counter that, there’s real value in Tim Walz doing appearances with influencers like this one.
Not only will Walz appear to be an authentic Midwesterner because he shops at Eau Claire based big box store Menards (I, a snooty outsider when I lived in the Midwest and someone who had other people do my gutters, tended to shop at the pricier Lowes instead).
And there’s no quicker way to convey that he understands how middle class people budget than his comment about sending in receipts to get an 11% rebate.
Most of those that Suebsaeng called mollycoddled hogs would be hard-pressed to understand, much less explain, the thick cultural connotations of this video. Instead, Walz just performs it, with his off-tune Menards jingle rendition to boot.
In other words, it’s not just that Harris has chosen to prioritize those who have trust with the voters she needs to mobilize. Influencers do several other things — things that are absolutely crucial for competing against Trump — that were encouraged on the right but are deemed a slight to journalism now.
Meanwhile, journalists treated with respect are increasingly pumping out Trump-scripted propaganda. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have been releasing increasingly supine coverage for months. They falsely reported that a platform that enshrines fetal personhood presented a “softened” GOP face on abortion. After a year of reporting on policies that directly parallel those in Project 2025, Maggie floated Trump’s complaints that Democrats were calling him on it. When that team reported on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “press conference,” the only lies they called out were Trump’s claim to have left office peacefully — but not his lies about the Biden-Harris hand-off, Kamala’s record, Biden and Pelosi’s demeanor, prosecutions of him, Willie Brown and a near-crash in a helicopter, the price of bacon, polling, or even crowd size.
But with yesterday’s coverage of the RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard news, this team really stepped over into joining Trump’s faked conflict. Both the subhead and the story presented the two as “progressive Democrats,” adopting Trump’s apparent goal in countering the increasing number of Republicans who are endorsing Kamala Harris.
Both Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Gabbard spent most of their public life as progressive Democrats. Only four months ago, Mr. Trump was calling Mr. Kennedy a “Radical Left Lunatic” who was “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.” Trump allies pushed stories about Mr. Kennedy’s record of supporting abortion rights and far-left environmentalism as they tried to make his independent candidacy less appealing to Trump voters.
The basis for treating RFK as such was a citation from comments Trump made earlier this year, when he was lying about Kennedy in order to improve RFK’s value as a spoiler to Joe Biden. It was all a show, the kind of drama any wrestling promoter uses to enhance the character of his conflicts. And yet Maggie and Swan just quoted it as if they’re too stupid to know Trump’s comments were all a show.
When Maggie and Swan “broke” the “news” that Tulsi was helping Trump with debate prep just weeks earlier, they included details also appearing in yesterday’s piece (such as about Tulsi’s long friendship with Trump, which totally undermines the claim that this association is news), but also repeated something else that is, at best, Trump’s interpretation of how well Tulsi did in the 2019 debate against Kamala.
Ms. Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party after her 2020 presidential run and has rebranded herself as a celebrity among Trump’s base of support, has long been friendly with Mr. Trump and was briefly considered to be his running mate. But her involvement in Mr. Trump’s debate preparation, which has not previously been reported, was partly because of her own performance in a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, when Ms. Gabbard eviscerated Ms. Harris in a memorable onstage encounter. [my emphasis]
The unmarked repetition of this opinion is particularly relevant given that others argue Kamala eviscerated Tulsi, precisely because the then-Senator called out all the ways Tulsi was already simply posing as a Democrat so as to platform her attacks on the party.
And Democrats have long been repulsed by Tulsi’s apologies for dictators, starting with Bashar al-Assad, but including Vladimir Putin.
You don’t have to decide which woman eviscerated the other. Indeed, avoiding such comment would invite a better explanation for Tulsi’s role in Trump’s orbit, one that these two Trump-whispers don’t claim to know.
Do they — two Trump whisperers who have covered Trump for years — not know that Trump is just a carnival barker, setting up conflict to distract people performing a role called journalism? Have they unwittingly come to merge their own consciousness with his? Or are they just wittingly part of the kayfabe now themselves?
Whichever it is, as actual journalists continue to treat Trump’s obvious con without comment, it flips the complaints about influencers back on its head.
The coverage Trump has enjoyed has long worked to pressure straight journalists into covering things with a right wing spin. And these days, it’s not clear whether the straight journalists need any help.
FYI there’s a Menards in West Saint Paul, all of a five minute drive from the Minnesota State Capitol.
It’s one of the thickest concentrations on that map, after WI.
Even the closest Menards to the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Menards’ home state, isn’t as close.
I’m glad there’s one here in Kentucky now too, mostly for the Sprechers!
Back in the 80’s we used to hang with Randy Sprecher at Chicago Beer Society taste testing. He was almost as nice as Walz. The beer takes me back to Germany. Soda is good, but the root beer is a bit too sweet for me.
I worked in Eau Claire for 36 years and got to know a bit about Menards, and its owner, John Menard. One of my children went to school with one of John Menard’s children. There are many John Menard stories, but the one that sticks in my mind was his transport of arsenic-ash in plastic bags from the company to his home. Menard then tried to dispose of the hazardous waste as part of the city’s regular curb-side trash pickup.
I’ve heard the guy is a scumbag but the contractors in my family can’t just not go there, sadly. The prices are too good.
Menards is about 3x the size of a Home Depot. They have better prices and much deeper stock. Weird brands on many items. Most important never, ever special order anything from Menards. Read your agreement. If it’s wrong, it’s your problem, not theirs. They will not stand behind it.
Wow, that is insane!
Indeed, there are a lot of stories about John Menard and his (substantial) eccentricities. One that is public is his solicitation for sex of one of his married direct reports, as it later involved a lawsuit and some of the laundry got aired. When she replied that she had a husband, Menard replied that she should bring him along, too.
Well THAT certainly puts a new spin on “Save big money at Menards”!
There’s one even closer in St. Paul proper, on University Avenue (which runs to within a block of the capitol grounds) at Pryor Avenue, and has light rail (green line) and bus service.
By the Twin City Model Railroad Museum! Gonna have to check that out on my next trip north.
Damn it. Thanks, Daddy Walz, you’re as bad as my spouse. I’m going to have that big box hardware jingle stuck in my head all day long. It’s the worst earworm.
Reminds me I need to go buy masking tape and cedar fence pickets, though…
Fun fact: jingle singers generally get paid a fee plus residuals at rates set by SAG-AFTRA This is one of the great benefits of unions. Here’s a link: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/jingles-way-making-living-music-advertising-37618/
So, sure it’s an earwig, but every time that Menard’s jingle runs it’s money in the bank for those singers.
I had a bankruptcy case once where a guy’s music became a popular ringtone. He got paid every time it was downloaded. Same thing.
Assuming right-winger owned Menards hired union jingle singers, said workers would be rolling in cash. I’ll have to pay attention next time I’m in the store (like today yet) to see how many times they play the jingle while I’m shopping.
I can tell when my spouse has been there without being told because he’ll be whistling the jingle all day. *sigh*
And then harassing me the next day for my recent Menards receipts because he’s got one to turn in for his discount.
Damn, don’t tell Herbie Hancock and Mongo Santamaria about my homemade “Watermelon Man” ringtone.
A trivia question that most people fail to get even close: “What song has been played on American radio more than any other?”
The answer of course is “Save big money at Menard’s” which has been their jingles for as long as I’ve been alive (and I’m no spring chicken) since if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Major media outlets are owned and controlled by the billionaire class. The people who do the hiring know this. The people who wind up talking on TV and covering politics know who they work for and what those people want.
Billionaires have three goals:
1. Protecting and preserving wealth
2. Insuring the unrestricted use of wealth
3. Acquiring more wealth.
Billionaires will sacrifice everything else to meet those goals. Why would anyone trust anything they or their minions say or do?
I think any examination of billionaire motives needs to go past the question of wealth to include ego gratification and stupidity. Money is a part of the picture, but these people are also fully capable of really, really dumb judgments that start looking wilful after a point.
The willingness of someone like Bezos to watch the Washington Post lose huge amounts of money and see its audience continue to shrink makes a lot more sense when you consider how he blew $40 billion divorcing his wife MacKenzie after clumsily trying to hide an affair.
David Zaslav’s bungling of CNN is on a par with his disastrous role running Warner/HBO/HBOMax/Max/Whatever over a cliff. He’s not exactly intending to burn billions of shareholder value, but he’s certainly not doing anything to change course either despite all of the massive amounts of evidence he’s seeing where he’s headed.
Ideology, too, including financial ideology, US political ideology and foreign/geopolitical ideology.
In my cursory review of the High Tech billionaires like Peter Theil and Elon Musk, these billionaires seem to have citizenship in multiple nation/states as well.
Populist nationalism like taxes, is for little people
I’d add a fourth goal to your list: transforming wealth into power. (The Yacov Smirnov joke almost writes itself.)
I’m unsure of their specific goals though I’m not disputing Ed’s list.
Instead, I can confirm that organizations, including news orgs, do what their owners want…. It seems self evident, but I didn’t recognize it until I experienced it. I write an article a month for a local paper. I included controversial comments made at a local town meeting. The editor removed them. Later, the editor explained that the owner doesn’t want to deal with complaints…. Think I’ll bother including controversial comments in my next article? Doh…..
Likewise, Maggie writes what ownership wants written. I think she would be gone if she were not Trump’s stenographer….
And yet Haberman doesn’t just write for NYT. She’s been a guest on numerous other media outlets and she still pushes the same schtick.
I think this is Haberman’s brand.
Haberman’s ‘unique selling proposition’ is her access to Trump. Without her access, what else would her writing have to offer?
Access journalism is propaganda, not journalism
It appears, then, that many if not most rightward billionaires, believe “that it can’t happen here.” If this is a reasonable assumption, then it may be part of the reason for the ‘bothsidistic’ coverage.
As far as the Times happily labelling RFK Jr. and Gabbard as “progressive Democrats,” a year and a half ago they ran an embarassing whitewashing of Musk’s politics claiming they were too “complicated” to label him as a conservative.
The bulk of Jeremy Peters’ argument for writing off Musk’s plain fascist statements was a few small donations to Democrats.
In other words, RFK Jr. and Gabbard’s obvious, long alignment with authoritarians is not enough to disqualify them as “progressives” but Musk’s minor deviations from pure right wing extremism is easily enough to disqualify him from any categorization at all.
The paper had no problem running a column from Maureen Down urging Biden to “leave gracefully” and then shortly afterwards another from her insisting “A Coup is Still a Coup.” They’re just putting their thumbs on the scale in the clumsiest, most obvious way, and hoping pure gaslighting will get them through.
Yes, Dana Bash was an exceptionally poor choice. I would rather see a small round table, with Harris, Walz, and two journalists, perhaps from the moderately left and right. Print journalists rather than television hogs. The one-on-one, knees to knees bit in a study is a very tired format.
Bash is bad, but it may be a calculation that she’ll be bad in a way they can control.
We may see the usual suspects complaining even harder how Harris and Walz didn’t take her gotchas seriously (blah blah Hunter Biden?) and pivoted effortlessly to the message they wanted.
I think this may be the tactical choice. They would be advised to follow Ms. Wheeler’s critique and go right after Bash and the failure of the Corporate News Network to hold the former President accountable. The failure to call out his obvious debate tactic of compounding and magnifying the lies is the most grievous failure. Attacking the media requires details to make the attacks stick. Just yelling “fake news” is not sufficient.
Just maybe Harris/Walz chose Bash n CNN w purpose.
I suspect they know CNN is NOT an honest broker.
This. If nothing else is clear, this should be… the campaign is thinking through every single thing they do and executing on their strategy perfectly. There is a small but decent chance Bash may not walk out of this with a job.
If they spoke first to MSNBC they’d be accused of looking for softballs from Democratic folks; they’re not going to go to Fox; so that limits the available choices if they want to inject the event into the cable news cycle. As to why Bash? I’ve not the faintest notion, but wonder what they other choices, if any, were.
And she no doubt doesn’t care about the occasional “Maggot” Haberman slur from Trump. Maybe the populace writ large ought to just refer to her as Maggot since “the boss” has sanctioned it.
Do these Trump whisperers, “not know that Trump is just a carnival barker, setting up conflict to distract people performing a role called journalism?”
They should. It’s one of his defining characteristics. Like Boris Johnson, Trump knows that the press has an insatiable appetite for the gaudy, outlandish, and overhyped, especially when it comes from someone who claims to be a person of stature and serious purpose. It’s as if you have to become a clown to cover a clown.
Reading Rick Pearlstein’s Nixonland and learned that Richard Nixon was actually a carnival barker in his youth in Prescott, AZ. It’s a Republican tradition it seems.
Thank you so much for the SubwayTakes video, which I never would have encountered on my own.
These people, ostensibly journalists, who are willingly joining the ranks of the Trump campaign to “flood the zone” with bullshit, they really don’t grasp the level of self-sabotage they are engaged in. MAGA true believers have already abandoned the news outlets that have long been touted as riddled with so-called liberal bias. Those who remain are far better trained on calling out hypocrisy than their predecessors. Daily Show-style montages catching people in the act. The entry of “gaslighting” into the popular lexicon. “This you?” quote Tweets as a hobby.
The script has been flipped. More and more, people are not looking to corporate media to add credibility to information that wends it’s way through social media. Instead, people are looking to respected subject matter experts on social media to validate what is being pumped out of the various for-profit news organs we are left with.
It is of course true that this changing dynamic skews with age. My seventy-something brother-in-law’s intake is largely confined to Rachel Maddow and The Economist, but that’s kind of the point. We’re watching the frogs boiling themselves slowly.
(Also, that Rolling Stone article linked above is a corker. Highly recommended)
I’ve gone over this page several times and not found a link to a Rolling Stone article. Sorry.
I someone can help me I’d appreciate it. — Thanks.
It was embedded at the word “mocked” — also a web archive link of RollingStone, not direct to the magazine’s site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240828141258/https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/dnc-2024-media-elite-harris-trump-1235089053/
I would add one question to your list:
* What did Trump say at Helsinki?
I can answer your question: “Yes.” My question: “What did Putin request of Trump in Helsinki?”
Huh.
I guess that’s a super important one.
I just want someone to ask him “what is a tariff ? “. I don’t think he has the faintest idea. He keeps claiming that China is going to pay the 10% tariff, this campaign’s version of Mexico paying to build the wall.
“Omar Tariff? He was great in Doctor Zhivago.”
A Steigering performance.
My Guinness, you’re right: Alectrifying.
I would add one more: does he really think that migrants coming here seeking asylum really come from asylums?
And I would further add, Did the Trump family forebear Friedrich Trump come from a Bavarian asylum when they migrated to the U.S.?
Why did Friedrich Trump evade military service in Bavaria? Are bone spurs common in the Trump family?
sksksksksk
Thank you for mentioning Will Bunch. I have his paper delivered to my home just to read him (the sports section has deteriorated drastically under the new editor). The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of those dailies that generally adheres to journalistic principles.
Alex Thompson has been quietly carrying MAGA water for a while. He’s referred to Hunter Biden’s youngest daughter as his “love child” which necessarily casts judgment on the young girl and demeans her standing among her siblings. He’s also referred to Merrick Garland as “Joe Biden’s Attorney General” when reporting, grossly deviating from historical standards and infecting the public discourse with the suggestion that attorneys general are imbued with an inherent political bias. This vernacular necessarily taints the office and erodes the public’s confidence in law enforcement inviting an inference that law enforcement follows a political path.
Agreed.
Will Bunch makes my subscription easy.
I think her first interview should have been with the Arizona Republic followed by The News and Observer in Raleigh NC, and with the oligarchic kingpins last in line. I doubt any good will can accrue from a CNN interview compared to a motorcade across PHX and local stops along the way for instance. CNN has zero electoral votes to award.
Agree in principle, though, at least for the Arizona Republic, I really doubt they have the horses anymore. And this probably applies to other once solid local newspapers. In our case, the Republic, it’s been hollowed out to the point it’s just a sleeve to carry the USAToday blurbs. I’ve cut back to Wed/Sun delivery, just to keep my hand in.
Imagine my pique when this last Sunday, the one and same Sunday after the blockbuster DNC, the entire front page and first section was devoted to a preview of our flightless Cardinals. The rest of the paper carried this theme along too, like it was all people are talking about down here, which we are very much not!
Precisely. Its difficult to anticipate any good coming out of feeding the journalists who have replaced the clergy as Orwell’s crows.
Great imagery.
I think the problem for any Democratic candidate who wants to be interviewed by ‘major’ media is that of ensuring fair coverage, and that means setting a lot of conditions for the interview. Maybe CNN was the only company which would meet Harris’s conditions?
Other questions:
How many secret abortions from adulterous affairs have you hidden with NDAs?
Which classified documents did you bury with Ivana?
Ashli Babbitt took a bullet for you so why didn’t you pay for her funeral?
Do you still watch 2000 Mules since Salem Media admitted it was a lie and pulled it from sale?
What is your health care policy?
Herr Hector
There was an old man, Herr Hector,
preposterous in all of his flaws,
Like a masterful kayfabe wrestler,
he teamed up with pretenders of laws.
He loved to force non sequiturs,
confused genetic with generic terms,
If he tapped some sympathetic nerves,
they morphed into synthetic worms.
He never could ever dare utter
anything more than a mutter,
Because his mind was so full of clutter,
he lost his assails in but her…
So he took to licking his fingers,
as if all of them were dead ringers
to bygone days with some swingers,
But now they were alt-right wingers.
There was an old man, Herr Hector,
preposterous in all of his flaws,
Like a masterful kayfabe wrestler,
he teamed up with pretenders of laws.
4/22/20, rev. 9/19/22, rev. 8/28/24
I can’t believe she wrote this. As I was peacefully watering the garden in the cool of the morning I was thinking that Harris/Walz seem to have prioritized the content creators. I thought, maybe my speculation that young people (and women also) have networks of communication that are totally independent of the corporate media was accurate. Ms. Wheeler seems to be writing along those lines too.
Perhaps in the digital age the networks similar to the Slave Telegraph are instantaneous.
And maybe the traditional media won’t understand the alternative communications network any more than men understood Nüshu.
I suspect somebody/ies in the Harris-Walz camp has a solid grasp of Muted Group Theory.
I had never heard of Nüshu before your post. I have a soft spot for the intersection of sociology and linguistics, so I thank you even as I bemoan the hour or so I lost down that rabbit hole.
Thank you, Rayne, for both of these references!
From the post: “And yet Maggie and Swan just quoted it as if they’re too stupid to know Trump’s comments were all a show.”
Two questions:
1) “As if” or “because”?
2) Are there no competent editors at The Times any longer? Regardless of the answer to 1, an editor should have removed this kind of uncritical drivel.
Instead of a Harris lawn sign maybe I should put these letters on signs instead.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/letters/letters-editor-august-27-2024-do-suburban-women-like-donald-trump-20240827.html
Paywall. Can you give the letters you wrote about? Thanks
PS: I am not sure if this is the name I posted under previously
[Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the SAME USERNAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS each time you comment so that community members get to know you. Your first and only comment up to now was published as “janmaugans” using a different email address. Either a name mismatch or email mismatch will trigger moderation. Please pick a username and email address and stick with them. /~Rayne]
I’m able to see it, no paywall. Only 2 of the letters were pro Trump (gas prices were lower); the other 15 or so were anti-Trump with words like “loathe, detest, liar, rapist”, you get the idea.
Yeah, it’s odd that so-called reporters wouldn’t be more up on what Gabbard’s relationship to Trump has been and now is. Tulsi Gabbard has been acting like a Russian plant for several decades now. If we look back quite some time, however, we find this gem:
https://www.rt.com/usa/456827-trump-servant-saudi-gabbard/
Apparently, what’s good enough for Saudi Arabia is now good enough for Gabbard? Seriously, she’s at best weird…and likely worse.
AP News produced an article yesterday, it showed up for me this morning with the headline: “Trump shares social media posts with QAnon phrases and calls for jailing lawmakers, special counsel”.
Trump’s behavior is getting even more bizarre – and one can hope that will mean more difficult for the mainstream scribes to ignore.
So all this stuff happening at the cemetery, including possible physical altercations. What was Secret Service doing while all this was happening? Did they not feel that there was any threat to Trump? Did they just stand around and watch this calamity? Is there nothing about Trump that doesn’t involve breaking rules and/or laws?
On the Arlington cemetery story, what worries me most is the attack on the employee who attempted to prevent the filming. She has declined to press charges for fear of retaliation. This reminds me of Marcy’s warnings about the threats by Trump and supporters suppressing voices in opposition. It’s bad enough when threats are aimed at politicians who have a certain amount of power, it’s truly horrifying when aimed at ordinary, everyday people just trying to do their jobs. Like the Georgia election workers…and probably so many others we never hear about.
Yes, but did the Secret Service personnel just stand there and watch or as a security force/I imagine law enforcement agents as well, did they do something?
Trump’s people say they have the video available, a lie unless it makes him look good, let’s see the video.
Is our need to see the evidence greater than taking sworn statements as to what happened, so great that we should double down on the offense of desecrating a military cemetery?
re-Rayne
August 29, 2024 at 4:23 pm.
That’s an incredible record, two desecrations. Congress and Arlington Cemetery. Where will the next one be?
I think as long as the president is not threatened in any way they stand aside. Including if the President is involved in illegal acts.
ew: Citing Mark Jacobs [link], Bunch also flipped Suebsaeng’s focus on mainstream gripes about influencer access. […]
Bunch describes Jacob as a “Chicago-based media critic” and “retired veteran editor of that city’s Tribune and Sun Times.” I did click through…and hoo-boy!
Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance
Instead of carping about TikTok, news outlets need to fix themselves https://www.stopthepresses.news/p/mainstream-media-on-a-path-to-irrelevance
Mark Jacob Aug 26, 2024
He makes some recommendations:
Just read that. I agree with pretty much all of it. I have less respect for the 10 million subscribers to the NY Times, since that’s just a solid YouTube channel. Derek Muller’s channel “Veritasium” (he does explainers about STEM topics, with ventures into history and economics) has 16 million subscribers, who eagerly consume whatever video he and his team upload.
Derek has a small team, with a big reach. I think that’s what the future looks like for political media. NYTimes is a whale that must be constantly fed with gobs of cash, and this makes them feel like they must appeal to everyone, which is the source of the problems we are seeing.
Wow, is that video of Wallz powerful. Not only is Wallz relatable, but that kind of outreach on social media is so much better than ads or newspaper articles.
Let’s not forget we live in a time where a YouTube channel has 30x the number of subscribers over the NY Times. 30x. There’s absolutely no point in doing an interview with the NYTimes. They are a fading flower. (To put my take in context, I also classify Apple as a fading flower. It’s powerful still, and will be for a long time, but things are not moving in their direction, but away from them. The visionary stage is long gone.) So much of what the NY Times is doing seems like it is trying to “keep up” with the times, rather than driving the times.
The “voice from nowhere” with no opinion of its own has kind of played out. What’s going to work better is the kaleidoscope of voices, each of which is known and understood. We are moving from postmodern to metamodern.