US Politics: Be Careful Out There

[Week]

9 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Again, you're talking about me, but not to me. It ain't a good look.

I don't really care. Thanks!

I will say, I agree with your COINTELPROgressive label ... Though I don't find it particularly useful. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

CNN is real stupid here.

CNN is just really stupid in general. Not Fox levels of awful, but they're not very ethical either. Ratings and money drive most of their decisions too.

Edited May 11, 2023 by Tywin et al.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

3 minutes ago, Week said:

I don't really care. Thanks!

I will say, I agree with your COINTELPROgressive label ... Though I don't find it particularly useful. 

You may not care to follow what I'm actually saying on these political matters, but I'm still happy to share bad puns with anyone who wants them.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Ratings and money drive most of their decisions too.

Of course it does, this is the fundamental problem with privately-owned political media - they're understandably run like any other business.  Do want to mention though - this was not a good business decision for CNN.  I'm sure ratings will pop - quickly looking it up the preliminary Nielsen is 3.1 million.  But that pales in comparison to how much airing that shitshow pissed off their consumer base. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

18 minutes ago, DMC said:

Of course it does, this is the fundamental problem with privately-owned political media - they're understandably run like any other business.  Do want to mention though - this was not a good business decision for CNN.  I'm sure ratings will pop - quickly looking it up the preliminary Nielsen is 3.1 million.  But that pales in comparison to how much airing that shitshow pissed off their consumer base. 

Obviously, hence why we should demand something better. But even when CNN was driven by these things 5, 10 and 20 years ago they still put out a better product than this current one which is nakedly awful.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

But even when CNN was driven by these things 5, 10 and 20 years ago they still put out a better product than this current one which is nakedly awful.

Yeah Licht certainly doesn't seem to be any improvement on Zucker so far.

[Zorral]

25 minutes ago, DMC said:

that pales in comparison to how much airing that shitshow pissed off their consumer base. 

I'm not one of their consumer base -- I don't subscribe to CNN.  However, I'd gotten the habit of clicking on them to see latest 'news'  2 or 3 times a day.  Since yesterday I haven't, and I never will again. Not that it matters or makes any difference.

In the meantime it's impossible to believe those who are only 'concerned' about 'woke' whatever pissing off so-called independents etc., not 'reaching out' to the nazi-fascists are in good faith since this worries them but evidently the actual nazi fascist murderers don't.  All the arguments are about how liberals are illiberal, no arguments or condemnation for the actual white nationalist authoritarian murderers.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I'm not policing anyone else, just calling you out on your BS. Though I do set standards of who I engage with, and what you're telling me is that you're not worth the time.

Yeah yeah. You already said that weeks ago when you stated that if only trans people would accept being deliberately misgendered without calling those people bigots that things would be better. From what I can tell you're just not a person of your word. 

But you do have a habit of telling others how to interact in broad strokes (just like you did to Week) and that just ain't how forum threads here work.

1 hour ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Haidt does argue for viewpoint diversity among academics and institutions in general, but you're misinterpreting what he's saying. He argues for pluralism, but staunchly differentiates that from a free-for-all relativism. Unless you can find me evidence that he actually makes the case you're saying he does, I call BS from someone who didn't really look into his views very thoroughly.

I've been reading and watching Haidt for like 12 years now when he was all the rage with Bakker. Your arguments about the REAL problem are old hat that neither you nor Haidt have particularly been able to address issues with all that well. I mean, you can read what haidt says himself after Charlottesville- where he states very clearly that the most important thing is to allow ANY viewpoint as long as you are not directly advocating violence or...gasp...being uncivil.

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-implications-of-charlottesville/

This is not a particularly novel argument to make. It is telling that his main problem with trumps association with nazis is not that nazis are bad, it's that people think nazis are bad and therefore will associate Trump views with other bad things. 

I think Haidt has some amazingly interesting things to say about the foundations of morality and psychology, which I actually launched into a talk with at dinner with @TrackerNeil a few years back. I think he is otherwise absurdly out of his depth and insanely naive about the power of discourse.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

20 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah Licht certainly doesn't seem to be any improvement on Zucker so far.

Interesting combination of names. Nice phrasing 

[Gaston de Foix]

22 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Obviously, hence why we should demand something better. But even when CNN was driven by these things 5, 10 and 20 years ago they still put out a better product than this current one which is nakedly awful.

CNN International is much better (or was when I last watched it). 

Anyway, I threatened to inflict a long post about Licht/CNN on y'all but I don't think there's anything much particularly original I have to add.  

I will just say that as a private enterprise driven by profit CNN has an absolute right under the First Amendment to de-platform Trump.  Their decision to give him a platform for ratings is unfortunate, short-sighted, and will blow up in their face, but whatever at least the profit motive is understandable (still wrong though). 

What I object to is the cant of dressing it up as a journalistic obligation by suggesting that the *real* lesson of 2015-6 is that CNN failed to understand why Trump was popular because it gave him insufficient airtime.  

[Mindwalker]

33 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah Licht certainly doesn't seem to be any improvement on Zucker so far.

I still can't believe Colbert worked with him. I mean, I'm probably too gullible here, but I thought C. had principles.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

I still can't believe Colbert worked with him. I mean, I'm probably too gullible here, but I thought C. had principles.

I mean, Zucker was a very successful executive/producer as well.  Doesn't mean either are equipped to run a news network.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

13 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Yeah yeah. You already said that weeks ago when you stated that if only trans people would accept being deliberately misgendered without calling those people bigots that things would be better. From what I can tell you're just not a person of your word. 

From what I can tell you're still struggling with basic comprehension of written words. Whether that's deliberate or not, I won't bother to guess.

15 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

But you do have a habit of telling others how to interact in broad strokes (just like you did to Week) and that just ain't how forum threads here work.

No, you're just a bit over-sensitive in that regard, and also love creating straw men out of things I apparently implied. 

I'm a pretty basic person, I engage people, and if they act trollish or otherwise waste my time, I stop engaging. But I give people the chance to change. I'm not the delicate weirdo that you may have painted in your head. Stop wasting my time and I'm happy to engage. Be childish or trollish, and I won't engage, it's pretty simple.

As for Haidt, he wrote this in the link you gave:

4) Don’t invite trolls, and don’t get angry so easily. Everyone on campus needs to understand the logic and culture of trolling: “The troll is a figure who skips across the web, saying whatever it takes to rile up unsuspecting targets, relishing the chaos in his wake and feasting on attention, good or bad.” Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and many on the alt-right are master trolls. I hope that right-leaning groups on campus will stop inviting trolls and provocateurs to speak on campus. It may be great fun to produce a campus crisis, but it does not help their cause, change people’s minds, or improve their universities. They are just throwing matches around dry forests. They should focus on inviting conservative and libertarian scholars and intellectuals, not performance artists. And when a conservative scholar comes to campus with provocative ideas, I hope that left-leaning students and campus groups will stop putting on angry protests, sometimes employing intimidation tactics. Just go to the talk and ask hard questions, or else ignore it. I agree that a Nazi march, a terrorist attack, and a president who is slow to condemn either one is a good reason to turn the outrage dial up to 11. Other campus speakers and events should be re-calibrated relative to that standard.

Maybe he's a little more of a Gen X liberal than you'd like, but he says inviting trolls is bad, and also that Nazis are different from those trolls, and worthy of turning up the outrage. 

But also, this is separate from his larger arguments for viewpoint diversity in institutions, though it's somewhat related.

26 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

I think Haidt has some amazingly interesting things to say about the foundations of morality and psychology, which I actually launched into a talk with at dinner with @TrackerNeil a few years back. I think he is otherwise absurdly out of his depth and insanely naive about the power of discourse.

Well, kudos for actually acknowledging that he has worthwhile expertise. DMC wouldn't even do that. I don't think he has all of the answers, and certainly disagree with him on points he's made, but I have yet to encounter anything in which makes him absurdly out of his depth. Anyway, that seems to be pretty popular around here.

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Well, kudos for actually acknowledging that he has worthwhile expertise. DMC wouldn't even do that.

My point about Haidt - pretty much the same as Kal's - is he's not an expert in political behavior or really much of anything regarding the political discussions he frequently opines about and is cited therein.  This is undeniable. 

But thanks for bringing me into a discussion I have no interest in nor was engaging in!  If I were you this would be the time I would tsk tsk you for improper thread etiquette.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

2 minutes ago, DMC said:

My point about Haidt - pretty much the same as Kal's - is he's not an expert in political behavior or really much of anything regarding the political discussions he frequently opines about and is cited therein.  This is undeniable. 

But thanks for bringing me into a discussion I have no interest in nor was engaging in!  If I were you this would be the time I would tsk tsk you for improper thread etiquette.

Hey, I mentioned your name! That's a lot less weird than the passive aggressive shade from Week. Apologies if you didn't want to be mentioned.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

43 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

What I object to is the cant of dressing it up as a journalistic obligation by suggesting that the *real* lesson of 2015-6 is that CNN failed to understand why Trump was popular because it gave him insufficient airtime.  

They gave him airtime because it was good for their bottom line. I'm sure their internal emails and texts would look a lot like those from Fox. 

If you're a news company and claim to be one, there needs to be certain standards, and they need to have real teeth.

37 minutes ago, DMC said:

I mean, Zucker was a very successful executive/producer as well.  Doesn't mean either are equipped to run a news network.

Diana Christensen was aces as an EP. And Gordon Gecko made a lot of people a ton of money. Who cares? 

 

[Gaston de Foix]

31 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

They gave him airtime because it was good for their bottom line. I'm sure their internal emails and texts would look a lot like those from Fox. 

Oh for sure.  But that's not how Licht is spinning it now: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/business/media/cnn-donald-trump-chris-licht.html

I'm trying to move to a different Kubler-Ross stage. You know what I hate? I hate the asymmetry of US politics.  If the economy sucks in Nov. 2024 we'll probably end up with Trump.  

But the economy sucked in Nov. 2020.  300,000 people had died of COVID under Trump's watch by then.  His administration was a shit show inside a clown circus which broke most of its own promises to its voters.  Biden still only won marginally.  Trump kept his base and significantly increased his vote share.  

Why does it have to be this way?

[Zorral]

As usual, Josh Marshall hits it out of the park.

Chris Licht’s Excellent World of CNN
Originally Published: May 11, 2023 2:42 p.m

Quote

 

.... CNN is designed to be mass audience, not niche. The business model is based on at least having a shot at getting the viewership of the whole population. You don’t have to be in cable news programming to know it’s a problem if a big minority of the population thinks of CNN as the “Clinton News Network” or “Fake News CNN”. So there’s a real imperative to get out of that penalty box. That’s been Licht’s core agenda: getting out of that penalty box. The problem is that Licht and lots of people from his world approach the question with a category misunderstanding of what Trumpism is and how our hyperpolarized political and media landscape operates. It’s not as though Trump and his carnival of circus monkeys have a discrete list of complaints which can, at least for the most part, be addressed and then everybody is friends again. In the world of Trumpism there is the obedient press and the enemies. The whole point of the Trumpian Wurlitzer is to exact a price for non-compliance and get executives like Chris Licht to metaphorically or sometimes literally follow Trump around asking, “Sir, what can we do to prove we’re not liberal and make you happy?”
 
It may be the only real “Sir” story anywhere in Trump’s vicinity.
 
The point, as you can see, isn’t to remediate any specific set of concerns. It’s to get a news organization into the posture of a supplicant. That both defangs the news organization from playing its proper role. It also them into an object of mockery for Trump’s supporters. That latter part is very much by design. You know this if you have a basic understanding of Trumpism and the characters who make up the Trump cinematic universe.

Don’t get me wrong. I too sometimes find myself nostalgic for the Bernie Shaw era CNN. Lots of hard news, straight at you. But the fact that that doesn’t exist anymore really isn’t about programming decisions at CNN. We live in a profoundly different era.

 

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/newsletter/no-100-why-was-the-cnn-trump-show-so-bad

[Week]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

But the economy sucked in Nov. 2020.  300,000 people had died of COVID under Trump's watch by then.  His administration was a shit show inside a clown circus which broke most of its own promises to its voters.  Biden still only won marginally.  Trump kept his base and significantly increased his vote share.  

Why does it have to be this way?

Those are certainly significant headwinds. Undeniably. I do think that Trump has tripled down on negatives while Biden has demonstrated he is a competent, fairly effective president. Whether his campaign can clearly tell that story remains to be seen.

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

But the economy sucked in Nov. 2020.  300,000 people had died of COVID under Trump's watch by then.  His administration was a shit show inside a clown circus which broke most of its own promises to its voters.  Biden still only won marginally. 

I mean, Biden only won "marginally" when it comes to the EC.  He won the popular vote by 4.5%, the second largest margin this century to 2008 - and considerably higher than anyone other than Obama.