US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

The incident occurred in the late afternoon on March 29, 2017

hmm

It was a Wednesday

no?

creepy

pic.twitter.com/RL1hCSeNnH

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) March 31, 2018

Local newscasts nationwide last week decried “fake” and “one-sided” reporting by reading from a shared script written by one of the most powerful broadcasters in America.

The so-called “must run” script, which local stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group were required to read, according to several reports, blasts “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script continues, according to a copy published Friday by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/watch-in-unison-sinclairs-local-stations-denounce-one-sided-news-stories

very bad

Par for the course. And somewhat mild compared to past efforts!

In November 2010, it was reported that five Fox affiliates and one ABC affiliate owned by Sinclair broadcast an infomercial critical of then-President Barack Obama, Breaking Point: 25 Minutes that will Change America, which was sponsored by the National Republican Trust Political Action Group.[174] The infomercial painted Obama as an extremist, and claimed that, during the 2008 presidential campaign, he received some campaign money from the Hamas terrorist group, and that Obama said in a speech, "You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You gonna have to kill some of those babies." The special also discusses Obama advisers Van Jones and John Holdren, as well as Obama staff Anita Dunn, Kevin Jennings, Carol Browner and Cass Sunstein – all in an unflattering light; in one case, the special claimed that Holdren said that trees should be permitted to sue humans in court.

This Fuckin' Country...

that is awful, and anyone involved in airing that should have been fired. but there's something different about having the local news anchor deliver the message while looking straight into the camera, in a commercial break during a newscast.

xpost RE: the "Breaking Point" disinfomercial

True. Sinclair has done the forced newscaster "editorial" thing for a long time unfortunately, their wiki is something else.

that is awful, and anyone involved in airing that should have been fired.

also, at first i thought "wouldn't the FCC be interested in regulating unadulterated hate speech that reaches millions of people? but then i remembered that the fun part of US Politics is that 2010 obama's FCC couldn't regulate it because he would be accused of suppressing his ideological enemies, while a trump/GOP FCC won't regulate things like that because they don't care as long as it damages the other team.

So, April titles? I withdraw my prior suggestion and submit:

"Sometimes It's Stormy In April"

this Sinclair business is nauseating, I shudder to imagine "TV news" even five years from now

I think a big part of the animus towards the Parkland students is they represent a coming generation for which the fact that some shithead puts on a suit and sits behind a desk on television means jackshit, beneath the slurs against them there's a genuine panic

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/unhinged-or-unleashed-white-house-stabilizers-gone-trump-calling-his-own-shots/2018/03/31/19447ae2-343b-11e8-8bdd-cdb33a5eef83_story.html?utm_term=.8a7ce72680e3

he got rid of the scotch tape, too

Trump is domineering his strategy regarding the expanding investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, in effect acting as his own lawyer. He is clamoring to reject the counsel of his attorneys and sit for an interview with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and malign him by name.

you're the boss, trump

the Sinclair stuff would probably bother me if it didn't remind me how infuriated I was when Clear Channel was buying all the radio stations and the idea of the local FM station was going the way of the dodo back in the 90s, or to stretch that further, every time I found out a regional microbrewery got bought by Miller or AB, etc.

Now you have more ways to listen to talk shows and music than ever (and there's more craft beer than ever!) and the fact that an of incurious sack-like subset of Americans still consumes whatever flavorless retrograde grog is poured in the general vicinity of their gullets is just not something I can get mad about much anymore. It's like getting mad at earthquakes when you live on the ring of fire. Plus local TV news, who the fuck even watches that?

who the fuck even watches that?

There are people who leave their televisions on every waking minute. I'm pretty sure some of them are tuned to news, now that what passes for news has become almost 100% entertainment-oriented.

I'm not questioning the existence of such creatures, as above. It was meant more in the sense of "lol local tv news, is that like Vine"

xxxposts: this is extremely dangerous to your democracy

Just to check, is that the ‘acts as own lawyer’ stuff there, Stan?

no, the Sinclair TV news script that ends with "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy"

Plus local TV news, who the fuck even watches that?

About a hundred million people, heavily skewed towards old people, i.e. the ones who actually vote.

after reading the Amazon headlines this morning it occurs to me that this presidency is like a murder mystery where the first half of the show runs through all the people with a motive for killing the asshole victim

oh eephus thank you I'd never heard that observation before

those people who actually vote must be the reason Mitt Romney won in 2012?

Local TV news is also a staple of lounges/waiting rooms/dining rooms of places too cheap to pony up for cable...which, in way, is a good thing, because if they had cable, 90% of the time it'd be on Fox News.

oh! I've never left the house in the 39 years I've been alive so

now that I know that the old people who actually vote are watching Sinclair broadcasting in their lounges I must agree that sounds extremely dangerous for our "democracy"

i get your angle tomboto but there's a lot of space between 'Sinclair is the death knell for democracy' & 'Sinclair's content has zero effect on the world'

also i think the comparison to clear channel in the 90s is a moderately decent one, insofar as both involve consolidation of media overlords and the narrowing of content. also, clear channel buying everyone out totally sucked for radio, and still sucks today. i don't get the comparison to beer companies buying each other out at all

as always, i admit my inherent bias toward caring about how old people are brainwashed by their tvs because my parents are old people who are brainwashed by their tvs. they watch local news every day and trust them more than the national broadcasts. i know i need to stop trying to change their minds but i still care. but the obvious counterpoint is that even if sinclair was dissolved and all the local stations somehow went back to being owned by local entities, my parents would still vote republican. their behavior would still be the same. there would just be one less daily 30 minute voice reconfirming their bullshit every night.

The common thread is that none of these are worthy of freaking out about because over the long term they are largely meaningless. The consolidation of control over relatively minor, quotidian aspects of our lives is the kind of thing people need to not freak out about in general, because the difference between Sinclair running things and the government running things is who you think is more accountable to you and what kind of oversight you're comfortable with. I think that's the argument worth having, not whether one entity should be in charge of most of some stuff (moot), or if some cranks forcing TV talking heads to read a script is a real threat to our institutions (which are moribund and crumbling as it is, for reasons much more frightening than oligopolies).

Anyway: John Bolton is the national security advisor and Trump is going to Korea soon.

the other part of the common thread is that I used to care immensely about stuff like this and when I look back on what has actually happened that's changed the world, wow, I was dumb.

He is risen, Hallelujah

Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. “Caravans” coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2018

those "caravans" in full

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/article_small/public/thumbnails/image/2015/06/22/18/15-LGBT-Caravan-Rex.jpg

Remember when the epithet "flip-flopper" used to be contemptuously applied to politicians who compromised on their earlier stated positions? Trump doesn't even bother to have reasons for jumping around from one position to another. He just uses agitation as a substitute for direction, as in "look at all that commotion; he must be getting things done!"

oh no, the DACA deal, we were so close

"catch & release" is yet another dehumanizing euphemism

man I guess I'm either weird or old for always watching at least 10 mins of localnbews, usually in the mornings

Do u vote tho

i knew about the bullshit new "are you a US citizen?" question on the 2020 census, but i didn't know about this other stuff:

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/13/593272215/for-the-first-time-2020-census-will-ask-black-americans-about-their-exact-origin
https://www.npr.org/2018/02/01/582338628/-what-kind-of-white-2020-census-to-ask-white-people-about-origins

https://i.imgur.com/76OENDK.png

For the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau is changing how it will ask black people to designate their race. Under the check box for "Black or African American," the bureau is adding a new space on the census questionnaire for participants to write in their non-Hispanic origins, according to a recent memo from the head of the 2020 census. "African American," "Jamaican" and "Nigerian" are listed as examples of origins on a questionnaire the bureau is testing for 2020.

The change means many black people in the U.S. may have to take a closer look at their family trees to answer what can be a thorny question: Where are you really from? While many black immigrants can cite ties to a specific country, that question is difficult, if not impossible, for many U.S.-born African-Americans to answer.

The bureau has not responded to NPR's questions about why it is making this change to both the "Black" category and the "White" category," which will also include a new write-in area for origins.

looks like moo vaughn's dreams are coming true

atlantean

he's a secret census overlord

xp

cash grab by ancestry.com imo

seems like there's a lot of public interest in this sort of information these days, good move that's quite a bit overdue

The Sinclair news anchor hivemind is eye-rollingly untroubling in a world where like >50% of the American population possesses the skepticism and critical thinking skills to look askance at such a ridiculous maneuver. If that country ever existed, it's clear that it doesn't at this particular time.

I’m sorry for being sick of ostensibly intelligent people having no memory and no ability to do math. That country exists right now. We live in it. Read the fucking polls and remember the popular vote.

For fuck’s sake.

Dude, people on every side of the election were taken by propaganda that flattered their worldview. Even ostensibly intelligent people have to make the individual effort to avoid being conned.

Sorry, not that many people voted for Jill Stein.

wheres the new thread at