Mendacious Media Coverage Gave Trump the Throne
By
David Gottfried
I have read scads of articles which try to tell us, with a straight face, that they have something new to say about the Democratic debacle of 2024. What is their brilliant, earth-shattering idea which, supposedly, will cure growing disaffection with the Democratic Party ?
The New Idea, which Supposedly Explains Electoral Politics, that has been Rehashed for Over 70 years
Their supposedly new idea is a recycling of misconceptions first bestowed on the public in 1952. To be exact, this new idea was first given to us at about 8:30 PM. on election night 1952.
Theordore H White said that as the returns came in from working class wards of New Haven, Connecticut, in November 1952, and it was clear that working people were voting in droves for General Eisenhower for President, commentators said that working people were alienated from the Democratic Party and were disaffected with its nominee, Adlai Stevenson, finding him too intellectual, too contemplative, and really quite a woos.
Indeed, the New York Daily News regularly referred to Adlai Stevenson as Adelade Stevenson, and Lyndon Johnson said that Adlai Stevenson was such a sissy that he sat down to urinate.
This is how Adlai Stevenson expertly skewered the Soviet Union in debate, before the United Nations, with respect to Russia’s installation of nuclear weapons in Cuba:
Many people thought Stevenson did a fine job of articulating the American position regarding missiles in Cuba. Nevertheless, when Stevenson visited Dallas, Texas, shortly before JFK was murdered in that same sordid Southern city, a large group of wealthy Republican ladies, known as the “mink coat mob,” attacked Stevenson, striking him and trying to pierce his flesh with umbrellas as they deemed him a “nigger-lover” and a “fag” who would let the “commies take over.” (Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a new phenomenon.)
In the course of claiming that working people were alienated from the Democratic Party, these commentators did not say that the Democratic Party was insufficiently liberal or inattentive to the needs of labor. Their critique was 180 degrees away from the Bernie Sander’s critique. The commentators of 1952 were just like the commentators of 2024: They said that working people found the Democratic Party’s liberalism too namby pamby, too soft, too mushy, too intellectual, and too receptive to imaginative ideas; imagination was nothing but flakiness. In 1952, these critics thought that Adlai Stevenson was sort of queer; today they paint the entire Democratic Party as a witches’ coven of lesbians, feminists and faggots.
The psycho-sexual attacks on Democratic Liberalism proceeded apace throughout the Post War era: After Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968, Richard Scanlon (I think that was his name) came out with a book entitled, “The Real Majority,” which said workers, flourishing in American suburbia, thought and felt just like middle level managers in bedroom communities and wanted no part of the quarrelsome, bitchy Democratic Party. In 1980, when Nancy Reagan got ready to turn the Whitehouse into Versailles, these same theorists said that Republican victory established the utter annihilation of working-class politics in America. Indeed, in their new, “classless” America, there were no workers. What had been workers were now “independent contractors” and “free agents” just as independent and skillful and shrewd as General Motors and fully able to compete and bargain with General Motors all by their lonesome self, without a union or a “Nanny State” protecting their interests.
Political “commentators” occasionally do have good ideas, but for every valid pronouncement coming out of their mouths are about 10 assertions that have the validity, and aesthetic appeal, of gaseous emanations coming from the other end of the alimentary canal, i.e., their ideas are as newsworthy and as artfully put as fetid farts coming from a bulbous butt.
The Intelligent Rhetoric that Makes Sense, Persuades and Woos Workers
Although workers might not be attracted to unnecessarily elaborate intellectual arguments, that does not mean that they will vote against a man simply because he speaks well and uses words with more than two syllables. A worker might not want to hear someone speechify for two hours – indeed, our most acute thinkers admired the terse and trenchant; Nietzsche said that a good writer will say in ten sentences what other writers fail to say in a book – but that does not mean that they only want to hear empty slogans. (Donald Trump has spoken for in excess of two hours and in all that time he never manages to spell out the details of any plans, for health care or the economy or of anything at all)
Politics Needs Narratives that Tell a Story
Nowadays, Politicians rarely if ever discuss anything with a beginning, a middle and an end, i.e., they don’t tell us what the problem is, how it developed and how they propose to address it.
Of course, even if Politicians did discuss problems coherently and systematically, most voters would never know anything about it. We deal in slogans, in short, snappy, snippets of information. We scream and shout: "Tax and Spend Liberal,” “Bleeding Heart,” “FeminNazi,” etc.
The absence of coherent narratives hurts Democrats more than Republicans because Democrats have srronger arguments on their side. When the politcal discourse is superificial, Republicans have the edge because an in-depth examination of problems umasks the infirmity of Republican positions.
Indeed, a few years ago, I read an article which noted that when the “Television News” (It must be placed in quotes; it is not news. These programs only concentrate on providing diverting film footage to satisfy the viewers’ voyeuristic need to get their cheap thrills from seeing people in agony) broadcasts segments of a politician’s speech, the median length of material placed on the news was about 47 seconds in 1967. By 1995, it had shrunk to quotes of 11 seconds.
However, there was a time when politicians explained themselves, and the people knew about it. Consider, for example, FDR’s Fireside chats. In these discussions, FDR described problems at length. Many of his fireside chats exceeded 30 minutes. In these chats, he did not speak like politicians do today in their State of the Union Addresses, in which they go through the sickening laundry list of problems, saying I will push for education, job training, social security, Medicare, defense, peace in the Middle East, blah, blah blah.
Rather, each fireside chat was an in-depth discussion of just one problem. Sample Roosevelt’s fireside chat at the end of 1940, which explained why we needed to send arms to Great Britian in detail, explaining why Germany was exceptionally odious, why we needed to buttress Britain, and why the isolationist argument was fatally flawed:
I also commend Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat on the banking crisis. It is the antithesis of the plain, old political bullshit of our time and is laden with lots of specific facts and the specific things Roosevelt will do:
Finally, consider Roosevelt’s invincible argument for liberal intervention in the economy in his dynamic and decisive chat on the Works Progress Administration and the Dust Bowl:
Some commentators and PR men claim that to get the votes of workers one must can the intellectual crap and speak in slogans: I urge you to listen to and grasp the specificity and detail in which Roosevelt discussed various issues. At the end of one of his broadcasts on economic problems, one might know as much about economics as a college Freshman who just finished a semester studying economics.
The American workers want to know what is going on. They do not hate intelligence; they hate snide intellectual affectations in which the speaker talks down to the worker, uses obfuscating speech to make the listener consider himself an intellectual inferior, and never truly illuminates an issue. Roosevelt, in his fireside chats proved himself to be one of the best teachers I have ever encountered. He was a college professor for people who never went to college.
Also, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon periodically addressed the nation in evening broadcasts to explain a specific problem in detail, and they often saw their poll numbers consequently rebound.
On occasion, Biden gave us evening addresses. However, they were short, formal and uninformative. They did not begin to do what FDR did: They did not explain what Biden was doing and why he was doing it.
How News Coverage, devoid of context and narrative, elected Trump
In this past election, Trump argued: There is inflation. Biden is President. Therefore, Biden should be fired. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was awkward and resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. serviceman. Biden was president. Ergo, Biden is a pussy and weak sister and deserves to hear a roaring rebuke ala “The Apprentice” in the form of, “You’re Fired.”
If Biden or the media had given us a narrative, instead of isolated factoids, Biden or Harris would have won the 2024 election.
As I have said in other essays, inflation was not Biden’s fault.
(Our Moronic political discourse presupposes that if anything good transpires, it is because of a wonderful, stalwart Republican President. If anything bad transpires, it is because of a deceitful, eunuch-like Democratic President.
Of course, by this reasoning, Hitler conquered France because Roosevelt was President, and Hitler had nothing to do with it.)
If we had a media which did more than specialize in sex scandals (Oh, let’s all talk like gossiping harridans and discuss all the girls Clinton and Ted Kennedy shtupped), and if Biden had given a formal address to the nation on inflation, he could have made these points:
1) There was a pandemic.
2) We feared that the pandemic would induce a deflationary spiral and a wrenching depression.
3) Therefore, both Republicans and Democrats, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden, believed the government should pump tons of money into the economy to stave off a downturn.
4) When more money chases the same amount of goods and services, prices inevitably go up.
And if you don’t believe me, just think back to 2020 when you got those stimulus checks from the government which bore Donald Trump’s signature at his egotistical insistence. The very thing he wants you to thank him for helped fuel the inflation that he wants you to blame Biden for.
Similarly, because of the malpractice of the media, and their contextless coverage of our exit from Afghanistan, the American people got the notion that Biden was just plain weak and was afraid to use force. However, if we had a fair media, which discussed issues with depth and intelligence, the American people would have known that Trump had actually entered into an agreement with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan. (However, the agreement delayed the departure date to 2021.) Biden could not have easily rescinded Trump’s pledge to leave Afghanistan as critics of the United States would have said that America’s word cannot be trusted.
In any event, everything about the coverage of the withdrawal is infuriating. Trump had actually decided that the United States would sit down and negotiate with the Taliban. Neither Bush nor Obama ever, ever countenanced negotiations with the Taliban, blood-sucking belligerents who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But Trump, that sniveling agent of Vladimir Putin, thanks to the Democratic Party’s failure to promote itself, and the twinky, tartish slobs of the media, comes off like a big protective Daddy who would never let any of his soldiers die.
The Media’s Warped Allocation of Time and Coverage Elected Trump
The media’s allocation of time and coverage has nothing to do with the importance of an issue. For example, problems pertaining to labor may affect 30 percent of Americans and may consume thousands of hours of thought and action by people in government. By contrast, problems pertaining to transgendered people may affect 5 percent of Americans (Less than one percent of Americans are transgendered, but I am including, and probably excessively estimating, friends and family of the transgendered and of girls who supposedly endure the placement of transgirls on their teams) and may consume dozens of hours of time by people working in government.
The media is interested in making money. (That is just one of the many ills engendered by a crass, capitalistic society). It doesn’t give a rat’s ass about edifying the American mind. Everybody knows that sex and scandal and freakiness sell. Therefore, the media loves to clutter up their news feeds with images and sounds designed to jolt, shock, distort and discombobulate America. Accordingly, the public discourse is almost empty of any discussions regarding labor; it is chock full of alarmist stories about transgendered people.
Accordingly, most Americans are oblivious to the many ways in which Trump harmed workers and Biden assisted them. For example, in his first term, Trump made 1 to 2 million employees lose time and half compensation for overtime by having them classified as semi-managerial workers. Similarly, he forced OSHA to classify certain chemicals, which all Western European nations ban as carcinogenic, as perfectly suitable for industrial use, exposing blue collar workers to these toxins.
Do people know about this. Of course, not. Our dim wit newscasters just want to talk about transkids and, of course, the most important news story of middle class, moronic America: Who the stars and celebrities are screwing.
Because of the media, millions of Americans thought that millions of girls were threatened by the presence of huge, menacing trans girls. Republicans produced ads on this topic, and they have been laughing their heads off since the election.