The Streisand Defect - eviltoast
  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    CNN was really bad about this in 2016:

    “Here we are outside the Trump rally due to take place in about six hours now…”

    Meanwhile, Sanders blows the roof off with 30,000 people. CNN? Silence.

    The joke I was telling back then was Trump couldn’t pass gas without live coverage on CNN with talking heads discussing if it were more “fruity” or “nutty”.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Meanwhile, Sanders blows the roof off with 30,000 people.

      CNN: Sanders has zero chance to win. Everyone hates him, and he is a poopypants. Vote for Hillary, because Sanders is doo doo cacca.

          • Asafum@feddit.nl
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            8 months ago

            Suddenly every story was misrepresenting Bernies compliments… He mentioned Cuba has a good education system so to CNN that means “Bernie wants communism! Bernie loves Castro!”

            MSNBC was even worse. Those chucklefucks were literally crying about Bernie being elected and executing them. (I wish)

            It was so disgusting to watch…

    • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Neolib media owners much prefer a raging fascist president to a socialist, as a fascist won’t challenge the status quo, just make it worse for the poors and minorities.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      CNN wanted Trump over Bernie, Trump gave them more views and Bernie would be an upset to the status quo.

      • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Nail on the head. There are some who call themselves Democrats who would rather have 1000 Trumps for President than let someone who would shake up the status quo get their hands on the levers of power.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Literally no Democrats are like that.

          News media, I’ll grant you. Not Democrats though.

          • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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            8 months ago

            Why not because they publicly say the right phrases to make you think we’re all on the same side and they have your back? Were you not around to witness what happened in 2016, or what nearly happened again in 2020, or what could happen now in 2024?

            Have you never questioned why, out of a population of 330 million, they keep hand picking individuals to back that fully represent the status quo, individuals who are so unlikable that they have already lost once and then only defeated him in a narrow victory once? Candidates who can barely defeat a known conman and reality TV star?

            • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              “They” are not growing new leaders because that’s not their job. The DNC is national (that’s the “N”). It’s your job on the local level to find good candidates and help them run for office the first time.

              • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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                8 months ago

                This is such a naive take. It’s not us who decide to back candidate X over Y, give them all the media coverage, or millions of dollars in party donations. Biden and Clinton weren’t picked by us to enter into the race for president.

                • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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                  8 months ago

                  Yes, it’s your job to donate to and support good candidates at the local level. That’s how democracy works. You have to participate.

                  Who is running in your local city council or mayoral race? Who is your state representative? If you don’t have a preferred candidate, find one. You can literally swing those elections with a few thousand dollars and votes.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Holy fucking conspiracy Batman

              Why not because they publicly say the right phrases

              “Ignore everything they actually say. Trust me, I know what they really mean”.

              Fuck you, crawl back to Joe Rogan.

              • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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                8 months ago

                You can tell their true beliefs by how they vote and the legislation they actually pass. It’s no conspiracy theory that it’s little more than lip service or virtue signaling when they give public statements about ‘X’ but never back it with actual legislation or if they do it’s legislation that is doomed from the start because they never had any intention of actually putting up a fight to move it forward. It all plays well in media headlines though and that’s all that matters to them.

    • samus12345@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Trump couldn’t pass gas without live coverage on CNN

      Appropriate, since “trump” is British slang for “fart”.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Which one gets more views? Trump gets supporters and angry opponents watching, Bernie barely gets supporters watching. Their job is to sell ads and therefore need viewers.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    S’real simple, corporate news. Use the words “lie” and “liar”. Start there. Now.

    True journalists may also note that “convicted fraud” “sex offender” and “high profile adulterer” are rock-solid legally and ethically. Go forth and fulfill your purpose. For once.

    • ringwraithfish@startrek.website
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      8 months ago

      Lie is a tough word to use in law and journalism. To accuse someone of lying you have to prove intent to tell the lie vs being truly mistaken.

      For example, if I say the Earth is flat am I lying or mistaken? If I truly believe that, then it’s not a lie, even though facts clearly say otherwise. I’m just not aware or choose to disagree with those facts.

      It’s maddening. I’m with you and wish journalists would use harsher language in obvious cases, but I understand why they tend not to as a standard to ensure they’re not opening themselves up to claims of liable and defamation.

      • cogman@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I’m sorry but no, they are not open up to liable or defamation lawsuits by calling a public figure running for office a liar. For pete sake, Tucker regularly called pretty much every popular democrat a liar over the course of his show. Pretty much every right wing mud slinger does.

        Here’s an example of CNN saying trump lied

        https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/16/politics/fact-check-dale-top-15-donald-trump-lies/index.html

        NY Times V Sullivan and the fact that this is political speech grants a WIDE amount of latitude for the accusations you can place against politicians.

        • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I’m not saying you’re wrong, but we may need another example since Fox successfully got a case dismissed under the specific premise that “no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously”

          • cogman@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Which is specifically why I linked to CNN calling trump a liar with no ensuing lawsuit. That’s your other example.

            You can google and find a bunch of other examples of media outlets freely calling politicians liars.

      • bort@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        I think “lie” should not only refer to “bold-faced lies”, but all lies. I also think it’s important to distinguish between differnt types of lies.

        … If I truly believe that, then it’s not a lie

        that’s an honest lie

        you can even say the truth while lying. e.g. lying by omission, or using Weasel word. Wikipedia has a list (because of course they do)

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Regardless of whether or not that’s true, Trump has literally been found to be a liar in a court of law so there’s really no excuse with him in particular.

      • glassware@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Also they shouldn’t do it unless they’re going to apply it to all politicians, like when Biden lied about seeing photos of beheaded babies in Israel.

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    The press reported that Donald Trump said he was a serial rapist who liked to just walk up and ‘grab them by the pussy.’

    The press reported that Donald Trump had gone on Howard Stern’s show and talked about how he was allowed to walk into the dressing rooms of the Miss Teen USA pageant.

    The press reported that Donald Trump called American prisoners of war cowards; while comparing his tom cat days as his personal Vietnam.

    Don’t blame the press, blame the voters who heard about Trump and decided they were okay with him because he hated the people they hate.

    • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      There’s a difference between reporting on the candidate and giving him free air time by broadcasting his rallies and speeches live. Most of the 24 hour networks (CNN especially) ran out of significant things to report on Trump relatively quickly, but they knew Trump stories (negative or positive) were huge for ratings, so they would cover everything he said. It’s estimated he got $2 Billion worth of free airtime this way. For every important story you mentioned, there’s days worth of mindless coverage the media companies churned out for ratings, and it absolutely helped Trump get elected.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        People perceive as important that which is given lots of exposure.

        I believe it’s called the “Halo effect”.

        That’s why people pay attention to, say, what movie celebrities say in subjects that have nothing to do with acting or movie making, to the point of paying much less attention to what subject specialists say than to what those celebrities say. If you thing about it, in absolutelly logical terms, the opinions of a well know movie actor on, say, poverty, have about as much value as the opinions of the local street cleaner (in fact, probably less value, as said street cleaner is likelly to actually be poor him or herself and thus know more about it) and yet people will actually pay much more attention to what said actor has to say on that subject.

        So Trump and others like them don’t even need much more airing of their actual words for this to work: the more they’re talked about the more important they will be perceived to be and hence when they do get their actual words aired the more attention people will pay to their words and even the more likely they are to trust those words (because he’s an “important” person).

    • bstix@feddit.dk
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      8 months ago

      It’s not necessarily as simple as actual mutual hatred. That only explains a fraction of his votes.

      His voters want to believe that if something is okay for the president, then it’s okay for them, even if it’s not.

      All his voters have “bone spurs” of some kind, so they want to enable people with “bone spurs”, and vote for Mr.Bone Spurs, even if trump would gladly fire someone for having “bone spurs”.

      They hate everyone else and he hates everyone else, so they feel represented, even if he hates them. What good has he ever done for the demographic that voted for him and paid his bills? Absolutely nothing. It’s one big ass grift.

      That also turns it into a sunken cost fallacy for a lot of them. They lie to themselves, because they’re too vain and afraid to face their mistake. The extremism plays into this as well. Once you cross a point of what is normal morality, it gets considerably harder to walk back from there.

      If Trump really hates immigrants, then why does he keep hiring them at Mar-a-Lago? The answer is simple: money. He has absolutely no interest in cutting off the supply of cheap workers. The extremely expensive wall construction also didn’t work in any meaningful way.

      The only thing he did successfully was to rile up a lot of angry people just to collect their money.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Human are way more irrational that we care to believe, which is why all that exposure made people feel he was important which in turn increased the attention they paid to him and the chances of them voting for him.

      It’s quite a common and massive error amongst the most politically-aware types to confuse the way in which politics are approached by themselves and others with whom the generally discuss politics (and it’s almost always other politically-aware types who care to discuss politics) with the way in which most people out there approach politics.

      Marketing works, so it makes sense that when it comes to people who are not strongly political and hence basically relate to it as they would to brands, marketing in politics works.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Irrationality isn’t an excuse. To me, blaming the media for Trump is like blaming candy makers for obesity.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Why not blame both?!

          It’s quite the hypersimplist take to look for a single entity to blame on a complex social subject. Blaming only Trump for this is like blaming murders in the US on only the murderers, ignoring the policies on guns in that country that make it more likely that murders get commited: those who only blame the murderers, by being bound by such an axiom, can only conclude that lower murder rates in other countries are because human beings in the US are somehow more prone to murdering that elsewhere, an interesting conclusion.

          Shits do shit because they’re shits AND because they can, because they get away with it, because they’re better off doing shit and even because doing that kind of shit is lauded by the wider society. Only the first condition is due to the shits themselves, so you need to look elsewhere to find out why the remaining conditions are also true.

          • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            I don’t blame the media because ‘pussy grabbing’ and ‘I like soldiers who didn’t get captured’ and all the rest were covered extensively.

            The truth was out there, people chose to ignore it.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          This is happenning everywhere.

          The US just has this strange mix of a less-than-Democratic Power Duopoly system, a Press totally captured by political forces and heavy on Propaganda, low average quality Education for a Developed nation and excessive nationalism and delusions of grandeur that makes people be a lot less critical than they should of the system they live in.

          I expect that the average natural stupidity in the US is no greater than elsewhere, it just seems that stupidity goes a lot further there and learned stupidity is a lot more cultivated by mass media.

    • therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      It also works vice versa, you all need to learn that making life decisions to spite your parents isn’t something to be proud of. Make decisions for yourself and smart ones at that.

    • rab@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      Just imagine how much better the world would be right now if she fucked off and allowed Bernie to win

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      To be fair, the onslaught of negative Trump coverage also helped him lose the house in 2018, the general in 2020 and a shit load of easy Republican house seats in 2022.

      People seem to forget that a lot of folks stayed home in 2016 because they thought it was impossible for that clown shoe to get elected. No one believes that anymore.

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It certainly doesn’t help that any criticism of Biden online, valid or not, is immediately met with “BuT tRuMp Is WoRsE!”

      Like, I get it, orange man bad, but if any discussion of Biden’s failures immediately devolves in to talking about the other guy, then opportunities to talk about his accomplishments are washed away by the people who need to be focusing on them.

      This isn’t just the media. The entire fucking conversation is always directed towards that dipshit.

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        The entire fucking conversation is always directed towards that dipshit.

        Understandable right now, because he’s an existential threat to the US, and will remain so every election until he’s either elected (at which point we’re done) or he dies.

        • force@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          the threat is never going away, even if donald trump died after this election we still have losers like nikki haley, MTG, mike johnson, desantis (although no way he’d get elected to a meaningful position again), etc. to worry about. even if they don’t have the cult following of trump, they’re still big issues

    • Microplasticbrain@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Really? I don’t think it’s nearly as bad this time around, maybe cause he has fuckin dementia and nothing he says lands anymore.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    8 months ago

    Hated this the first time, hate it this time. If everyone shut the hell up people wouldn’t have paid him much attention.

    • Chr0nos1@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I’ve also been saying this for a while. If the people who hate him quit talking about him, they will quit advertising for him. Let him be forgotten. I honestly hear significantly more people and news media who are against him, talking about him, than I do people in favor of him. Don’t let him live in your head rent free. Talk about the person who you DO want as president. Talk about the things that are important to you, that your candidate is for. Don’t talk about the other guy. Let his name fade into history.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    You don’t have to report “both sides” of an issue if one side of that issue is blithering insanity.

    News today: "Should we eat horse paste and shove UV lights up our own asses to fight Covid? Donald Trump says ‘Yes’ but honestly, WHO KNOWS? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ "

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    In a modern world where we are capable of doing so much more … we instead actively choose to want to do far, far less

  • mlg@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    mmm yes I suppose it also had nothing to do with the alternative candidate gg ez cheating their primary and defending said cheating after getting exposed

    or I guess if you want to apply it to right now, I suppose it had nothing to do with the incumbent funding a genocide and running his campaign on “well at least I’m not the guy who’s even more evil”

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        No, he’s very openly said he wants to exterminate Gaza.

        You just never hear about it here because THE WHOLE GENOCIDE JOE THING IS LITERALLY PROPAGANDA. YOU ARE BEING MANIPULATED WAKE THE FUCK UP.

        • Sootius@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          How can it be propaganda? He is currently overseeing and speaking positively of his massive support for a genocide, happening right now. That’s as truthful as it gets.

          • Asafum@feddit.nl
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            8 months ago

            Except he isn’t? He’s literally telling that fuck in Israel to stop and has ordered humanitarian aid to be dropped in. He even demanded a ceasefire so they could help the Palestinians and that fuck in Israel said “nah, we want the land they’re all terrorists.” He can’t just stop giving aid because isrealis have a ton of political pressure here on our government and they were attacked so we’d be made to look like the assholes for cutting off the aid.

            It’s people online that are going way overboard with the “Genocide Joe” nonsense when it should be that fuck in Israel. Fuck his name, he’s “that fuck in Israel” to me.

            • Sootius@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              He can’t just stop giving aid because isrealis

              So he’s continuing to oversee massive support for a genocide? As in, precisely what I said? We’re not just talking about generic ‘aid’, we’re talking bombs and guns in the billions of dollars. Biden and the dems are fully able to stop funding Israeli genocide, but choose not to.

            • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              So…he can’t cut off the aid, because the optics are bad? That seems like a very, very poor excuse for supporting genocide. Also, the optics for supporting genocide are not good, either.

              • Asafum@feddit.nl
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                8 months ago

                It’s not purely the optics, but the fallout from it all. Major loss of support means Trump wins and the bombing continues or even gets worse, so as another user put it elsewhere “Biden is dealing with a hell of a trolly problem.” No matter whether he pulls the lever or not people will suffer :(

                • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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                  8 months ago

                  Major loss of support from whom? The pro-genocide lobby? He should be running away from that endorsement, not towards it.