Way back in the distant past, lost to the internet, when Pharyngula was just a tiny project I was running on my lab computer, one of the subjects that pissed me off was pseudo-objective journalism. The kind of thing where a New York Times reporter would write a long article on the geology of the Grand Canyon, and give equal time to creationism and real science, and excuse it by saying,
I don’t consider myself a creationist. I don’t have any interest in sharing my personal views on how the canyon was carved, mostly because I’ve spent almost no time pondering my personal views — it takes all my energy as a reporter and writer to understand and explain my subjects’ views fairly and thoroughly.
This is the kind of journalism where facts and evidence don’t matter and aren’t part of the evidence — all we’re supposed to care about is cataloging the opinions of the uninformed, and weight is bestowed by how loudly they are shouted, or by how rich and famous the ignoramus with an opinion is. The journalist doesn’t have the time to assess the facts, all their energy is consumed in transcribing quotes. And worst of all, they tout this as a goddamned virtue of good reporting.
This is how that clown Donald Trump can be the Republican front-runner: facts don’t matter. ‘Journalists’ don’t care about the truth of a candidate’s claims (unless, of course, it involves sex), and feel no responsibility to investigate. They just report. Someone can make an idiotic proposal, and the court stenographers at the paper of record just print and publish. There are few who are pointing out the impossibility and inanity of Trump’s ideas.
The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, “Trump’s roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent.” It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that’s to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump’s advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing.
Further, the pandering ‘journalists’ will turn most savagely against any real journalist who dares to question. Jorge Ramos was one of the rare ones who was brave enough to object to stupidity with evidence, and he was vilified by other reporters. The Washington Post was outrageous, presenting the story as two “conflict junkies”, Ramos and Trump, who were simply mirror images of each other.
I saw red at that. It was just like those bad newspaper articles that would equate evolution and creationism. Hey, they’re both theories, right? We gotta be fair and balanced! We don’t have time to get a science degree, we’re too busy writing down everything Ken Ham and Kent Hovind say!
But here’s what Ramos was saying.
“What he’s trying to sell to the American public simply doesn’t work. It’s impossible. He cannot deport 11 million people from this country,” Ramos said “Can you imagine the human rights violations that would create? And then the expense … is he willing to spend $137 billion to deport 11 million from this country? That’s just one problem. He can’t build an 1,900-mile border [fence] between Mexico and the United States. It’s absurd.”
“When you say immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists, isn’t that spreading hate?” Ramos continued. “When you call U.S. citizens anchor babies, isn’t that spreading hate? When you call 11 million people in this country ‘illegals’ — and no human being is ‘illegal’ — isn’t that spreading hate?
“This is not politics for us. This is personal. When he’s talking about immigrants, he’s talking about me. He’s talking about half of the Latino population in this country that is 18 years or older that was born in another country. So the things that he considers just ‘blunt talk’ is clearly offensive.”
That ought to be front and center in every story about Trump: that he’s howling hate and insanity, and promising cartoonishly impractical and vicious policies. Every piece about the man ought to say, at some point, “But that won’t work, and it will harm millions of people”. But instead they all rubber-stamp the lunacy, and the electorate blithely assumes that it is therefore reasonable.
America is cursed with a political party that is racing for bottom of the cesspit, a public that doesn’t care, and a media that has totally failed to do its job and check the excesses of political rhetoric with reality.
Aah, the breathtaking stupidity of the American mass media, no matter how stupid something is, there are always people prepared to believe in it. I’m sure they are well paid for their support.
Ignorance has become validated as an intellectual position. Cowardly politicians proudly proclaim, “I am not a scientist,” the modern slogan of no-nothingism, and feckless journalists let them leave it at that. Do none of them think to ask, “Well then, Senator, ho do you form your opinions on scientific issues?”
By repeating what your lord and master tells you to say.
That is straight from the Book of Driftglass PZ, well said. The Trump campaign is the predictable outcome of the last 40 years of Republican politics pandering to racists, Christian extremists and avaricious libertarians in order to win elections. A responsible political party would look at the mass of fools at a Trump rally and disown them. But the Republicans won’t do that, because racist’s votes count too.
It is tempting to absolve the journalists as just trascribers of what the blowhard trumpets, to give the people the information they need to decide he is a blowhard and worthless of public office, and then blame the readers for taking the “Mass Media” as some kind of authority, whatever the mass media reports is worth listening to and adopting fully into consideration. Blame the readers as stoopid, rather than the media for publishing the stoopidities.
*ack* recall, I first said it is “tempting” to think that way, not trying to justify it. Journalist could at least put a little commentary around those quotations.
EG: “he said this ridiculously offensive thing: ________ “.
Rather than the faux disclaimer of,
“I am not a climatologist, but Inhofe threw a snowball in the Senate Chamber”.
*ugh*
look at Faux Noise asserting “fair and balanced” which is clearly a lie, given their totally unfair and imbalanced reportage. BUT one must remember that FauxNoise aint the only blatherbot. Their rivals are the same only in the opposite direction. Trying so hard to actually be “fair” (unlike Fauxfair) that they refuse to highlight which subjects are shite and which actually worth considering.
Journalism in the US has been on life support for decades. The days of Woodward and Bernstein are simply warm, fuzzy, memories of what it used to be. Reporters don’t report any more, they simply take dictation without any intent or desire to understand what is underneath the words they write. And they’ve become timid mice in fear of losing “access”. That scene the other day at the Trump Q&A session with Ramos has to be one of the lowest points in journalism that I can remember. For a presidential candidate to behave that way and not be called out on it by the reporters in the room is astonishing. This event has strong overtones of the very dangerous and nasty direction this country is moving.
@3 lofty
By lord and master, do you mean Charles Koch?
It’s disturbing, depressing, terrifying and a dozen other -ings all at once to see so clearly demonstrated just how few of the voting public that a genuine working democracy depends on have absolutely no bullshit detectors and filters installed in their Kardashian obsessed minds. For all the talk about advanced species, way too many humans seem to have not advanced above the level of rapturously gawking at the one with the baboon haircut who is only good at flinging feces and grunting manically at the other troop. And this is what they find desirous of a national leader. Disgusting is the most apt -ing for this obscene play being acted out.
And Comedy Central is the only reasonable choice for good “journalism”. Sigh!
My dad was a first-generation US citizen, at least on his father’s side (grandpa came to the US to avoid being forced into one of the imperial armies during WWI in Eastern Europe). So every time someone says “anchor baby” I think of my Dad and seethe.
I’m hoping that Trump’s current run is because it’s 14 months before the election and only politics junkies are paying attention right now. When the public starts actually considering the presidential election next fall, things will likely be different, and Trump will have bailed by then because his ego will no longer be getting pumped adequately by that point.
Literally everything Ramos said. That, that, 1,000 times that.
To top it all off, Trump’s a hypocrite (Surprise!). You know he said recently he was boycotting Oreos after they announced their plan to build new plants in Mexico, roughly halving the number of jobs at their Chicago plant? He said it was bad for the American people.
Trump has a clothing line, the “Donald J. Trump Signature Collection”. Guess where it’s made?
The form of journalism you speak of is, sadly, alive and well and living on CNN. Many of their segments that are meant to inform and update people on current topics is to host a couple Official Spokespersons of two far sides of an issue, and have them yell at each other.
CNN has been a vast wasteland in the middle of the cable channels for years.They’ve desperately been trying to recover their former importance by trying to mimic Fox and yet, for some reason, they become more and more irrelevant. As Marcoli points out, their news reporting is having two or more people argue and yell at each other until it’s time to pound on the latest missing plane story. I refer to this style as Jerry Springer reporting.
Both Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow showed segments that also covered what happened after Jorge Ramos was ejected from the Trump press conference. Some hateful, ignorant man told Ramos, “Get out of my country!” To which, Ramos replied, “I am an American citizen too.”
Maddow also covered the way that Trump mocks Asians as well as Latinos. The 6:59 video covers the history of Latino and Asian voting blocs as well as the current situation. The latter part of the video covers the contretemps with Jorge Ramos, including what happened to him after he was escorted out of the room.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/fox-news-battles-monster-it-helped-create-513068099606
That’s a link to a video from Tuesday’s Rachel Maddow Show. In the video, Maddow takes a closer look at the feud between Donald Trump and Fox News. She highlights the fact that Fox News and Trump share a tactic: They both answer legitimate questions by pointing to their poll numbers and/or market share. Absurd.
During the contretemps with Jorge Ramos, Donald Trump answered/evaded a question from Ramos by talking about the lawsuit Trump had filed against Univision. Apparently, a $500 million lawsuit automatically excuses a presidential candidate from answering questions about immigration. In the video, you can see Trump light up with glee when he mentions the yuge size of the lawsuit.
*A* political party?
Part of the problem is one of a lack of journalistic integrity (actual journalistic integrity, not the gamer gate variety) – all too many journalists think that they are covering themselves by reporting all sides of the argument as if they have equal weight, and treating know nothing blowhards as if their arguments are in all regards equal to those of people who have made the particular field of inquiry under discussion their life’s work in a rigorous academic setting. By doing this, the journalists think they can preempt any accusation of bias and avoid any possibility of being sued or otherwise finding themselves in the firing line for taking any kind of stand for accurate reporting and meaningful journalism.
When this happens in a society like our own (and I am not just talking about the US here; the same is true of politics in the UK, broader Europe and indeed much of the world) , where over the course of the better part of the last century the Overton Window has been shifted simultaneously ever further Rightward and also ever more toward credulity and woo over any appreciation for actual evidence, then this self interested journalistic obsession with an imagined golden mean results in the practical effect of forcing the discourse further and further away from any meaningful description of reality.
This rot of cowardice infesting the Fifth Estate has come at a particularly bad time given the inexorable rise of the politics of fear and its even more insidious cousin, the politics of easy answers. With so many journalists abandoning their responsibilities, and those who still have integrity being silenced by any means available, it is much easier for cynical fear mongers to first whip up public paranoia about imagined threats to do with things like immigration (terrorist atrocities over the last several decades have been an absolute gift to the Right in this regard), and then to offer a simple answer easily palatable to people who know little to nothing about the reality of the issues and just want a palliative for their fear (that has been so exploitatively kindled for this very end), and so idiocy like Trumps policy of deportation of eleven million innocent people not only isn’t dismissed as the manifest drivel it is, but actually gets air time where it is cast as a credible policy option by journalists too timorous (or too interested in currying favour) to point out its many and glaring failings. This has the added bonus of sucking all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to discussing actual threats to society that vested interests want kept quiet, like global climate change.
Hurray for George Will.
… and with that comment I desperately need to shower.
Fox News is where all the rich smalltown snots who answer every criticism with “So? You’ll never be popular like me” go where they grow up. Now they have to deal with a rich bigtime snot who looks down on them, and the only trick they’ve got won’t work.
Fortunately, there is still Ben Goldacre.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread:
According to Trump, it is not his fault that racists are flocking to his campaign, or at least it is irrelevant that they are racists:
Note that, once again, Donald Trump thinks that high poll numbers equal virtue. Doesn’t matter how you get there. See comment 285 in the Moments of Political Madness thread for the endorsement from David Duke.
Trump also claimed to not know who David Duke is. Too many claims of ignorance. He also claimed to not know who Jorge Ramos was, but that was belied by his “Go back to Univision” remark.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-david-duke-bloomberg-politics-interview-taxes
From the opening paragraphs of Goodbye to Berlin:
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
… and in the background Godwin appeared …
For the record: I am not a Trump supporter, think he is an odious political shill and would never vote for him.
However – and I’m sure you saw that coming – someone who has endorsed a socialist for President has an interesting definition of “truth.”
I’d agree to this caveat in every Trump story if you’ll agree to the same caveat in every story about Bernie Sanders. Collectivist, authoritarian political and economic ideas harmed probably an order of magnitude more people in the 20th century – and just look at what they’re doing to the poor in places like Venezuela today – than Trump’s policies would harm if they were ever enacted (a stretch at best).
Someone interested in ‘truth’ seeks it without regard to their personal political preferences.
I don’t get how he thinks it’s an endorsement of his writing that it can’t even inform himself enough to make a decision.
It seems Trump has just snagged the endorsement of David Duke. Not that that in any way surprises me, but I am a little surprised that Trump hasn’t warmly welcomed his support. It would certainly be at home among the unwashed mouth-breathing idiots who want to vote for him.
In The Grauniad, an analysis, Donald Trump wants to deport 11 million migrants: is that even possible? (which I have excerpted in the USAlien Political Madness discussion thread).
The trouble is, looking at the other Republicans I’m not sure Trump shouldn’t be leading the Republican primaries.
Heck looking at the Republican field, I’m not sure Hannibal Lector shouldn’t be leading.
Tom Weiss @23
First, learn the fucking difference between socialism and Stalinism. Sweden is socialist. Are you claiming that Swedish socialism is harmful? Sanders’ socialism is much closer to Swedish socialism than 1940s Stalinism.
No, I will not agree to your misunderstanding of Sanders’ socialism. I doubt too many other people here will agree either.
I’m another who says your definitions are fucked up TW. And try to show evidence of harm with links to appropriate academic sources. Your constant making of factless claims makes your arguments truly pitiful.
That’s about enough Tom Weiss. Bye, go back to whatever Tea Party hellhole is your natural environment.
“There are few who are pointing out the impossibility and inanity of Trump’s ideas.”
Consider yourself lucky. Since a few years in The Netherlands there is literally nobody but one blogger who does such things.
@28, Perfectly Cooked Pasta: Thank you for that and for saving me some typing. One of the social studies units I have greatest appreciation for from my junior high days was a detailed description of the political spectrum. It’s kept me from being the kind of Faux News watching idiot that thinks Hitler was a socialist because the Nazis had the word socialism in their title, or referring to Obama as a communist. People that fear Bernie because of ignorance of the political spectrum are the driving force behind the utter shit volcano American politics has become. The one individual that can make things better for hundreds of millions of people is the one people are fearing because they are utterly clueless about variance between communism, Marxism, socialism, etc. Hell, I’m sure they have Darwinism in there somewhere. If my stress levels were any higher I’m sure their stupidity would make my brain bleed.
McC2lhu @33,
Tell me about it. I can report from Australia that the ignorance of the diversity of left-wing politics is profound, with both major parties fighting tooth and nail to avoid any whiff of Socialism. I just found out that the goddamn *Labor party* left the Socialist International last year, but still have the gall to describe themselves as a “social democratic” party. *spit*
And don’t even get me started on our bipartisan support for refugee concentration camps. We’re leading the world in viciousness.
Trump’s proposals should trouble every one of us down to the soles of our feet.
When he says that he wants to deport 11 million people I get images of loaded cattle cars chugging to the border or to sprawling internment camps in Texas or the Arizona desert. This would call for the expansion of our government’s already massive police state apparatus on a scale never before seen on this continent.
As Sinclair Lewis said in It Can’t happen Here: “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”
I have come to the conclusion that The Donald thinks our government runs like his reality show – all he has to do is point and shout, and His Will Will Be Done.
Illegal immigrants? No problem, Trump points at all 11 million of them and their citizen children, and says “You’re deported!”, and they disappear. China? Iran? Just shout at them, that’s what they need, they’ll all cower before the Might of the Trump.
Basically he’s behaving like a spoiled toddler. Throw a tantrum, get his way. Oogh, I feel sick.
one of the thing that we should not loose sight of in considering these radical proposals that come up in politics is everyone cost a lot of money. It has been made clear that to the right-wing politicals wealth and money is a primary motivator and measure of success they show their worship of money even to their churches and the reverence they declare for the “job creators” .
There is always the absolutely corrupting influence of this worship if money. Unregulated Wallstreet, I wonder what level of greed is involved in the security state created by all the contractors working for the government still collecting all the info on us or at least still delivering all the hardware and software all ready contracted for if not getting paid without having to do any delivering at all. Trumps proposal to solve the immigrant problem is one of those ideas that would be next to impossible to control. Money would simply disappear in to well connected pockets while people would be almost randomly hurt.
heaven forbid that we should even look into anything more important than sports scores, some “bimbos tits” or contentless slogans or empty hats
uncle frogy