Bill points out that as much as the media has failed us over recent decades, this is no time for business as usual.
Everybody’s going to have to up their game.
Hunter Thompson said during Watergate, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” In that fashion, it seems as though for a decade, comedians have had to do the jobs Journalists no longer do.
That has to end.
Pieces like this show that Maher is one of our sharpest observers, and most important media voices.
Chasing nickels and dimes down the sidewalk, through the gutter grills and right into the sewer. NOTHING matters to them but “The Sign of the $”. Their sold-off self respect least of all.
On Friday, the White House took the unprecedented act of barring The New York Times, CNN, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC and several other news organizations from an off-camera briefing known as a gaggle. Meanwhile, several right-wing news outlets were allowed to attend, including Breitbart, The Washington Times and One America News Network. Just hours earlier, Trump repeatedly attacked the media, describing it as an “enemy of the people.”…
=> Committee to Protect Journalists: Trump’s Attacks on Media Will Be Felt by Journalists Around World
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Joseph Goebbels
http://oi67.tinypic.com/34y9xz5.jpg
http://usuncut.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/millergoebbels.png
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Karl Marx
I’ve watched the press change for the better [having been shocked out of their lethargy by Trump & Co.], since at least midway through the election, particularly the print media such as the New York Times and The Post. Since the election, they have been even better.
While I like Bill Maher and I agree with him that the press was not great prior to this unbearable nightmare of a damn presidency, I believe that they are doing a great job now, albeit for small reward since they clearly aren’t being given credit for it.
I should add that the reason for the low approval rating of the press is likely due to Trump voters.
The progressive left has never been much a fan of the corporate press, either.
https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499
Likewise, low approval of the ACA is inflated by progressives who firmly believe single payer is the way to go.
It is kind of amazing how Trump has forced the media to rediscover the importance of facts and objective analysis as opposed to their go to modes of spin, optics and the reduction of issues into meaningless and eternally unresolved conflicting opinions. We shall see how long it lasts.
Agreed. But the refusal to be more objective re the media can only harm us. After all, they are now doing much of what we have consistently demanded that they do. Is there still room for improvement? Of course. And I think that protesting local media outlets [who are owned by corps. and/or individuals that have always preferred to play it safe] could pay off big.
And yes, completely amazing that at least the national media has done a huge turnaround due to the fact that they now realize exactly how important a strong and free press is to a free country!
“[who are owned by corps. and/or individuals that have always preferred to play it safe]”
Intended to type not ‘who’, but ‘which’.
Bill nails it again.
A democracy cannot work if people are misinformed and uneducated, which is why a good education and fact-based ideologically neutral reporting is so essential.
Life is too short and too valuable for clickbait.
And now this coward Trump isn’t even joining the annual White House press dinner. When you are a coward that’s OK. But when you are a coward with an extremely big mouth there’s something wrong with your brain. Who’s gonna stop this psychopath and how?
The progressives will stop him if you give them a chance. Unfortunately, corporate money grabber and Clinton operative Perez was elected DNC chair, securing more Republican control in 2018 in Congress and an 8 year Trump presidency. When Perez starts strategizing against Gabbard or Warren in the 2020 primary to favor Tim Kaine or Biden, just like Wasserman-Schultz did against Sanders, folks like me go 3rd party or fail to show up at all; and what the corporate media won’t tell you is there are a lot of folks like me that have no partisan loyalties; incidentally if the media starts giving equal air time to third party candidates during election run ups then that is the day this country regains a free and objective press, and not before.
The only thing corporate Democrats hate more than losing to a Republican is losing to a progressive, as the latter might disrupt the corporate bribes and revolving door system that are major components of the current system. The best hope for a 4 year Trump presidency is another deep recession which is fairly likely with Wall St. continuing at the helm; hoping to use 2008 – the greatest wealth transfer from the middle class to the 1% in history – as their business model.
Liberals are not the enemy of progressives. As long as the US has winner take all elections, we will have a two party system. We can only win when we form practical and pragmatic coalitions. Corporate liberals generally recognize the need for well regulated markets, and a healthy, educated and fairly compensated workforce in order to sustain a stable polity where the interests of all sectors of society are duly considered. We can work with that. Conservatives not so much.
Progressive: Equal liberty and justice for all.
Liberal: Greatest liberty for the greatest number.
Conservative: I got mine, screw you.
Why should Trump show up so a bunch of liars can make money by lying about what was said? Take the swedish story http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/21/rioting-erupts-in-immigrant-dominated-swedish-suburb.html
If you do not like that link google a swedish link and read the story in swedish from sweden.
The lies about the bowling green story just go on and on. Here is a list of muslims who tried to shoot or blow us up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#Islamic_extremism
What i like about Tommy’s Terrorism In The US link is that the Right Wing and Anti-Abortion link of right wing hut job white guys terrorism and killings is almost 3 x’s as large as the Islamic list. I’m sure Tom does not give two whacks about that kind of his own information tho.
Pollution kills more people every year than terrorist do. Your friend Trump is trying to turn the US into China 2.0 which will increase the butcher’s bill.
More Americans die from bathtub accidents than terrorist attacks.
Sure, Tom. It’s Faux “News” which is your bible. Tell me why your Trump was enjoying himself when attending the 2011 White House press dinner? He was brave enough to do that, but he’s too coward to attend it this year. Trump cannot deal with criticism. Same as Hitler. Hitler was a sick megalomaniac, and so is Trump. And now he wants to increase military spending by 15% (of course at the expense of environmental protection). That means he must be preparing the country for WAR!
And when you add the dots, Trump will be the first trying to escape his war in his airforce one, this coward.
I was looking at the news this morning, sunday. The ex CIA head said calling muslims radicals who want us dead , radicals was a bad thing. That is why the war goes on and on. When somebody wants you dead and you refuse to acknowledge the problem they just keep killing and killing and spreading their hate. We need something different, FDR had it correct in WWII, unconditional surrender.
We’re currently doing interventions in 7 or so Muslim based countries. At one point we ran out of bombs we’ve dropped so many. We’ve spent trillions fighting potential terrorists and all it has done is create more terrorists. This isn’t FDR’s WWII – this isn’t classical warfare. Indeed there are no solid goals to what we are doing over there, what constitutes a victory, or how to leave; the only goal is to enrich the defense contractors and secure Republican power by airing boogeymen on TV all day to garner a sense of fear among the public.
If you want to decimate radical religious ideology from the ME: 1) convert to clean energy; 2) pull all troops, bases, and other instruments of presence from the Middle East; 3) send no more dollars to Saudi Arabia which is ground zero for radical propaganda that gets broadcast over the entire region; 4) stop selling arms to terrorists and countries that give aid to terrorists; 5) let the Middle East go back to fighting amongst itself over who has the best magic sky-daddies.
“The ex CIA head said calling muslims radicals who want us dead , radicals was a bad thing.”
What McMaster and people like him are saying is that it’s bad thing to call these people “radical Islamic terrorists” … because it reinforces their own propaganda that what they’re doing is A) Islamic in the first place B) radical-extreme-supergood Islamic into the bargain. McMaster counters that by saying that what they do is _unIslamic_ and we should be unafraid to tell them so.
I’d agree. Given what we know about marketing and how to convey and reinforce messages to particular groups and to whole populations, my approach would be for everyone – but especially young people interested in their own religion and their commitment to it – to constantly hear that ‘unIslamic’ word. It sterilises the soil in which the seeds of the ideas spread by Daesh and similar youtubers are expected to grow. Using the “radical Islamic” expression sets up the notion that you will be an even better, bigger, stronger, more extreme, more radical Muslim if you respond to their messages. Putting even one small hurdle in the paths that lead to radicalisation is an excellent idea.
These people will have first to convince themselves that they are not unIslamic if they adopt certain ideas or engage in certain actions. The “radical” preachers in mosques throughout the Western world will have to come up with responses and arguments when people ask them about whether it could-might-may be considered unIslamic to join in with violent groups. Most of the time, thinking twice, thinking more deeply, is enough to dissuade most people from undertaking commitments to such extreme courses of action. Most importantly, communities which absorb the violence is unIslamic message will be much less inclined to let pro-violence rhetoric pass without comment or criticism.
Not so much a rant as a brain dump, not a big one but the master bater is now running low on the ‘little grey cells’.
ICYMI, here is what Tommy Poo had to say when it was pointed out to him that greenhouse-gas-induced global-warming is cooling the stratosphere. Tommy Poo was also supplied a link to a video clip of Ben Santer making that exact point.
In case you have a brain, the atmosphere is not on two planets. If less energy is in the upper atmosphere, less energy is in the lower atmosphere as well.;
Link here: https://climatecrocks.com/2017/02/23/ben-santer-on-seth-meyers-late-show-how-climate-deniers-lie/#comment-90873
Of course, Bill was all buddy, buddy with Yiannopoulos recently, so his judgement isn’t 100%
Having mentioned Richard Lindzen recently, on another thread in reply to Voisin ignorance, I see that Lindzen could be behind another one of these nonsense lists of nnn scientists, in this case 300 who are trying to spike attempts at climate change mitigation.
Story here, with links to Guardian etc., Just who are these 300 ‘scientists’ telling Trump to burn the climate?