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I mean honestly, I don’t think the press just started doing thing. I’ll be honest, I’ve near zero trust in the mainstream media as a truthful source of actual news. And I don’t think an apology fixes it. The issues are too deep for that, and they won’t change just because they promise to do better. I think at this point, the press need to clean house, top to bottom. Until then, I think it’s just reasonable to ignore the media and look for actual news.
I knew that they were lying about the polls when suddenly the “Keys” history professor showed up everywhere telling people how he’d never been wrong and only he could turn the keys. And if you paid attention, the keys he was talking about were either clearly false or manipulated to become true. Kamala was declared the incumbent, for one, which isn’t true. No major wars (just forget about Ukraine and Israel, both of whom were funding), a good economy (stop noticing the price of things). I felt like I was watching Baghdad Bob declare that there were no tanks in Baghdad while a tank rolls by behind him. More ridiculous than anything, but I felt like this was an insult to my intelligence. They couldn’t possibly think people would fall for this.
Man, this is a bit off the path of this topic, but it's been months since the hurricane fucked up western North Carolina, and I still can't tell fact from fiction. All I see are randos on twitter talking about FEMA kicking people out of shelters, and then taking their kids because they don't have adequate shelter. Some road a bunch of good ol' boys cut through a mountain to Chimney Rock that FEMA closed down, despite there being no other road. Some guy devastated that FEMA stole the building he'd leased for his business, and since his home was washed away, now he has absolutely nothing. There was definitely that one lady who instructed FEMA workers to skip houses with Trump signs, and apparently she went out trying to take everyone down with her, claiming those orders came to her from higher up as well. Was that ever substantiated? I don't know!
It reminds me of the oral tradition from the Great Depression, about FDR stealing gold from lock deposit boxes and slaughtering entire herds of cattle to fight deflation. Visiting local national parks there are exhibits about all the people forced off their land by FDR to establish some of those parks, and how they were totally given a fair market value when they were forced off. I'm pretty sure the worst allegations about FDR stealing people's gold might not have happened exactly the way it's described. But this debunking does not inspire hope as it's full of the usual managerial weasel words I'm used to. FDR didn't steal the gold. He just passed an executive order requiring it be sold to the government at a price they immediately raised after they'd gotten it all. And even when the government did confiscate people's gold, it's because they committed a crime. Like not obeying the executive order to voluntarily sell their gold to the government.
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Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.
Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.
What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.
My mom's told us a story a bunch of times about how, when she was in school as a kid, one day she and her classmates were told to head out to the sports field because some reporters wanted to take a picture. So the reporters had her and her classmates sit on the bleachers, and took a couple pictures, and then they told the kids to start make fists, start yelling and waving their fists in the air, look real angry. The kids did it, and the reporters took a couple more pictures. The next day, one of those last pictures was in the paper for a story claiming that she and her fellow classmates had staged a race riot.
Point being, it's definitely older than Journolist.
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Don't take this the wrong way (I agree with you), I'm not trying to pull a Reddit "source?" move, but I would genuinely love to see links for each of these things.
I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.
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