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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about.

I don't want to get into an object-level argument about this (though my personal stance is probably blatant), but it's interesting and funny how for the opposite side it's viewed as the exact opposite of this, with the perception that all media across the spectrum is always "grading Trump on a curve" / minimizing his actions because they're so acclimated to it while the left can get away with much less than he can.

Freddie deBoer recently wrote about this, in Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us:

This is the “why has the media gone easy on Trump??” narrative, which has somehow flourished for almost a decade now despite the fact that Donald Trump has been covered more critically by our media than any other figure in my lifetime, seemingly to his advantage.

He proceeds to gives a ton of examples from the New York Times.

It’s incredible that so many people sincerely believe that the Times is a secretly pro-Trump publication, as they don’t even bother to pretend that their op/ed section is a space where actual pro-Trump sentiment is going to be shared, outside of a once-or-twice a year novelty piece.

[..]

If they go so easy on Trump, why can they not scare up a single authentically pro-Trump voice for the Opinion page? This recent NYT piece asks nine members of their editorial team to reflect on who they’re voting for and why. All nine are voting for Democrats. It’s a bunch of plugs for Harris or the Democrats generally and one weird endorsement of an environmentalist who stole his wardrobe from the Lumineers tour bus. They couldn’t even find a single staffer to endorse a Republican for appearance’s sake, to ward off the obvious criticism. Not one!

I'm sure there are people on both sides that claim their guy isn't treated fairly, and the other guy deserves more scrutiny. But I think this is a case where the Democrat voters are simply wrong.

Grading Trump on a curve as, say, Ben Shapiro says he does, does not exclude dubious media hysterics over Trump. I think the shrinking institutional media leans hysterical while claiming objectivity, while new media tends to grade him on a curve, and simply says thats what they do.

The other point is that various biases cause both old and new media to focus on trivialities (process scandals, horserace polls, gaffes, bimbo eruptions etc.) over substantive coverage of what is actually at stake. And, at least in this cycle, both candidates are leaning in to the media obsession by not sharing meaningful policy proposals at all (Kamala) or sharing stupid proposals which his intelligent supporters insist he won't actually implement (Trump).

Because partisans of both sides think that their side is right on the merits, they see a bias in favour of trivialities over the merits to be a systemic bias against their side.

I never understood this either. There's an argument that I've heard that the media is biased precicely because they don't go after Trump hard enough. I can't compute it. As a reasonably disinterested American, all I've seen for 15 years is the media constantly going after him, but in the last few months, basically since he was shot at, the media kinda, sorta treats him like he's a presidential candidate--while also reminding us how terrible he is at the same time. The idea that "Trump has been normalized " is so far beyond my perception of reality I don't even know how to engage with it.

What? Who says that?

Trump has been normalized only in the sense that what would have been shocking for another candidate is blasé for him. He’ll do something scandalous, the media will insist it’s a scandal, and then everything will continue exactly as it was.

I remember not too long ago, a bunch of conservatives got excited because the audience for whatever show Colbert hosts now, booed when the CNN affiliated host said something about them being impartial. It was amusing to me, because the conservatives took it to mean, even this progressive audience knows how biased (against Trump) CNN is. Of course, the reality was that they were booing CNN for being biased in favor of Trump, because this was within about a month of the debate and that was the normie progressive take, that CNN was basically in league with Trump.

I've seen the claim a few times on notes on Substack and shared posts from Twitter. Along with things like, "If Trump is elected we will literally be killed!"

I'm not sure if you're objecting to the claim that the media is saying Trump is being normalized or that people are complaining that media has been normalizing Trump. Both have happened a lot.

How Not To Normalize Trump

Fallon: I Didn't Mean to 'Normalize' Trump

The Case for Normalizing Trump

Don't Normalize Trump's Vision for America

Normalizing Trump: An Incredibly Brief Explainer

How We Normalized Trump

We are Normalizing Trump. Again.

Protesters Outside of New York Times demand newspaper "Stop Normalizing" Trump

This has been going on since 2016. I mean the media obviously aren't normalizing him, in my opinion and experience, but people are certainly claiming that it's happening.

What? Who says that?

At least one progressive has said something like that to me directly. In particular, there were quite a few examples of this attitude in the recent aftermath of Trump/Biden debate, where I saw quite a few tweets to the effect of "Why is the media being so harsh on Biden when Trump said/did XYZ" etc.

I've seen it said, or maybe heard it said. But I can't point to anything specific.

Usually when I see or hear it I just realized I'm living in a totally different information environment than whoever said it, and I give up most hope of discourse with them.