The LA Fires have been Donald Trump’s Best Friend

Irresponsible Media Coverage Precludes the Pivotal changes Required to Heal our Rapidly Disintegrating, and Nominally Democratic, Political System.

By

David Gottfried

First, kill all the media moguls and their asinine, smiling, blow dried newscasters.

Of course, I don’t literally advise killing people who are part of the media. I suppose I am under the spell of Shakespeare who famously said, “First, kill all the lawyers.”

It was never my intention to start a substack newsletter to lambast the media. In large measure, my focus is on politics. However, worthwhile political change is impossible if the media gives people a warped conception of how the world works. More to the point: If the media doesn’t apprise you what the biggest issues are, and who the culprits are, you won’t be able to make sound political decisions when you vote.

For example, in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, Republicans succeeded in disseminating the message that liberal politicians and a general sense of permissiveness were letting criminals have the time of their lives and that, consequently, major liberal, Northern cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit, had the biggest murder rates in the nation. In fact, Southern states run by fiercely conservative, segregationist governors had the biggest murder rates in the nation.

The nation bought the Republican charge, that liberal Democrats boosted crime, hook, line and sinker. That, in large measure, made Nixon win in 1968 and 1972, made Reagen win, and it made Bush the elder win in 1988. That dynamic controlled the votes of a huge chunk of the populace until Clinton’s victory in 1992. Needless to say, it did not occur to many idiot TV newsmen to do any real journalism to determine if there was any truth to the idea that liberal politicians made our cities murder infested capitals of vice.

Similarly, in 1994, New York’s Governor Cuomo was ousted by his republican challenger, George Pataki, who said that the poor were getting away with murder because of the excessive generosity of the welfare state. Among other things, Pataki said that New York’s Medicaid program was spending tens of thousands of dollars, per patient, to give bald men hair transplants. A complete and utter lie. (A friend of mine, who practiced dentistry in New York at the time, told me that Medicaid would pay him only a buck and a half for drilling a cavity and filling it up --- he stopped seeing Medicaid patients.) However, some idiot newspapers simply repeated Pataki’s charge (newsmen had never bothered to assess the accuracy of Pataki’s charge), and to the common dumb dolt on the street, a newsman’s quote of a candidate’s charge was tantamount to a certification that what the candidate was saying was in fact true. George Pataki, a pliant tool of the corrupt and malignant Alphonse D’Amato, ascended to the Governor’s mansion.

The LA Fires have Been Donald Trump’s Best Friend

For the past six days, most of the electronic media has devoted 99 percent of its coverage toward the Los Angeles infernos. I should say, at the outset, that I agree that the fires have been ghastly, and I sympathize with the people of Los Angeles.

Of course, the print media has covered many other stories, but in our increasingly illiterate country, most people only heed the electronic media. By electronic media, I am referring to television, radio and material on the internet which is received in the form of images or sound, i.e., stuff that is not read.

(There are many reasons why people who read the news will generally know more than people who listen to or see the news. There are several very specific, concrete reasons why receiving the news through images and sound will always make one less informed than someone who reads the news.¹

While our dumbed down media has talked about fires incessantly, it has forgotten the rest of the earth.

In the 48 hours before Los Angeles lit-up, we were hit with the following headlines about Trump:

A) Trump had aggressive designs on Denmark, Greenland, Canada and Panama and refused to rule-out military action to seize those nations.

B) Zuckerberg agreed to get rid of his fact checkers so as not to disturb his excellency the Donald, Il Duce the Second.

C) Trump has raised 200 million dollars for his inaugural revelries (It doesn’t take 200 million dollars to throw a party; most of the money will, presumably, serve as an all-purpose slush fund),

D) Judge Cannon (A bitch of a witch of a Judge who was made a Judge by the Donald – of course, no one would ever dare to suggest that she should have been disqualified from hearing a case pertaining to Trump because she owes her Job to Trump) ruled that the American public is not entitled to read Jack Smith’s report about Trump’s shenanigans and

E) Jack Smith resigned.

It would be nice to know how these stories are developing. It would be nice to know how the world, our diplomatic corp., our military and NATO (Denmark and Canada are members of NATO) are reacting to Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, Canada and Panama and to challenge Denmark’s sovereignty by taking Greenland from Denmark. But the media forgot about those stories; they are too busy bowing down to the LA fires as ardently as Carthaginians transfixed by the fires burning the flesh of children being sacrificed to the gods for a good harvest.

The Electronic Media Overlooks or Confuses the Most Important Features of the Fires

Also, although CNN, MSNBC and Fox have spoken about the fires for 99 percent of the time, they have neglected so many salient aspects of the story.

For example, the New York Times reported that 100,000 to 200,000 people have been evacuated, or have been forced to evacuate or have been advised to evacuate. There are about 9.6 million people in Los Angeles County. Hence, only a very small percent of the population has been near the flames. However, the electronic news media doesn’t tell you this because it enjoys the sense of all-consuming crisis as that makes things seem ghastlier and boosts ratings.

Similarly, the electronic news media reports that thousands of structures have been destroyed, but they don’t tell you what the NY Times tells you: Structure is defined very broadly and includes even cars. The electronic media thereby manages to dramatize and exaggerate the dimensions of the catastrophe as the sense of calamity makes the audience loathe to leave their TV sets and boosts ratings.

And while the American people spend countless hours listening to newscasters who repeat the same damn miserable thing all day long, the American people forget about, or can’t keep track of, the multiplying acts of malfeasance perpetrated by Trump.

Perhaps, this is why the American people can’t get anything done anymore. The media, in a word, behaves like an eight-year-old boy with attention deficit disorder. It flits from news story to news story with unrestrained febrile hysteria. And in its rush to report stories rapidly and brashly, it very often forgets the facts.

(The media is most error-prone when covering science. People in the media are very attuned to image and appearance and are ardent admirers of the superficial and affected; facts and science are not their forte. About 5 years ago, the New York Times reported that many cancers were about to be cured because medicine had just discovered drugs that prevent the ability of solid tumors to construct blood vessels to feed a tumor’s cells. However, further checking revealed that the New York Times had published a similar story 15 years ago. In fact, medicine was not on the precipice of destroying all solid tumors and the media, betraying its munchkin-minded conception of all things pertaining to science, published the same defective story twice.)

There are certain facts that the media should report, but the media, always opting to convey pathos and bathos and people blubbering in exhibitionistic agony on TV, has no time to report the Most Important Facts:

These are the Most Important Facts and Issues which Responsible Journalists should address: What mistakes created the fire, what did we do that we should not have done and what can we do to avert another calamitous inferno.

The Electronic Media’s Exhibitionistic Forte: Interviewing a poor, distraught person ravaged by the Fires and displaying studio-perfected, affected sorrow and fellowship

The media won’t address the important stuff. That would take real work. And why should the media do that when there is such a simple and quick way to get a popular, exploitive story about a poor shnook who is wholly messed-up by the fires.

All the media need do is go to a relief center where municipal workers or volunteers are handing out sandwiches, keep their eyes open for a terribly pathetic and comical shlub – fat women and men who haven’t shaved since Summertime are ideal --- and encourage them to emote with abandon, perhaps cry a little, and recount a tale of woe. Your ratings will soar, and as the newsmen fly back to New York, they will smugly congratulate themselves on giving us a lot of film footage which does not in any way illuminate the cause of the problem but expertly skewers the poor people who are, as usual, hurt the most.

1. See my substack article published on February 25, 2021