Again, this piece is "right on the money!" And the problem is exponentially worse due to the repetition of lies perpetrated through social media algorithms, the dumbing down of American education, and spineless politicians relentlessly repeating these lies. And speaking of lies, "the big lie," is not that Trump won the 2020 election, it is that there is a "liberal bias" in the news.
Not surprisingly, Thom Hartmann delivers the most reasonable and well documented explanation of how and why our national media apparatus is failing us. Thom being a great translator of the seemingly unknown into the simply knowable isn't news, but what he delivers in today's Report certainly is.
And I'll end my comment with this tell all quote from Thom' piece:
"As we saw last week when The New York Times featured an editorial calling for its heavily Democratic readers not to vote and then altered the headline in response to public outrage, our pressure can alter media behavior.
Absolutely true and every sane person’s blood should be boiling now. Canceling subscriptions to the NYT and WP is a start. But also sharing reports like this on social media can help undo the brainwashing of America. I am heartened by events in France and the UK. Let’s make it happen in the USA.
I was concerned about the tact to the right in France ( polls seemed to indicate) - - so it is refreshing to see that either the voters in France woke up , or the media just hyped it all up.
In any event, I share your call for the
USA to follow the example of voters in the UK & France .
I’ll take a breath and try to calm down- in the hope that the spell
The other thing we can do is spend our cable and paper subscription money on Substack subscriptions instead. There's lots of great, honest and thoughtful writing to be found and supported there. I am not going to cancel WaPo after reading this. Thanks Thom.
I am with you Dotty, except substack doesn't have an option for one time year subscription.The latest business model, being adopted by everyone it seems is to have one sign up for a recurring subscription,with the promise that you can cancel at any time, only problem is by the time you need to cancel or want to cancel, you forgot how. and a minimum subscription is $80, times that by the number of substacks to which you would subscribe, the add in the number of streaming services to which you subscribe, your anti virus, and I understand that now, you have to yearly subscribe to windows or it's office program, and how can you manage a budget (or does one now a day),much less eat, travel, cloth, warm, entertain without going into perpertual debt slavery.?
Not only is the mainstream media corrupt but the AM radio stations broadcasting right wing hate radio are as well. I think Trump is using the media to instill a lack of confidence in our voting process also.
Unlimited greed or capitalism always ends in a train wreck! Lying, intentionally ignorant, delusional, greedy Americans, 85% of whom claim they serve God, are going to reap what they have sown! Get prepared for the worst and hope for the best!
The thing about radio is that it is a form of media that can reach people in their cars and at work. Can't read or watch while driving. But they do put Fox or CNN on TV at bars and airports.
The owners of the media have no care other than their pockets. Their lack of care for the entire country make them unfit to be owners. All the more for Dems to campaign on the wrongs of the media and why they will not cover actual issues of import. The people have bought the idea that individuals with great riches are a good thing for a country. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most of their money goes to causes that have no impact in society. Even most of the winners of society fail to see that they support ideas that are simply wrong and their money supporting their issues are mostly a wast of time. Only one out of ten are real contributors to society in the long run. The other nine do not have the money to promote their ideas that can be successful because nobody knows that they will be. Even the rich try to find good ideas to support and fail because they get scammed even when the actors are being honest. Nobody knows who these people are. We are just not good at it. The only way to increase the success of society is to insure everyone gets enough to thrive. But you cannot have mudsill generating unearned millionaires as a consequence of making over half of American's poor. A top take rate of 94% for income and 50% or more for business is the only way to change the behavior of business to end mudsill and help society be one that everyone can thrive by a basic income for all.
There has got to be an Rx beyond running around panic hair-on-fire pointing 'it's not so!' Yet voters in the EU showing signs of awareness. Maybe humans' BS tolerance does have a limit. Bring The Blue Wave!
The structure of the EU and it's history is an impediment to a unitary executive, in America the impediments have been gradually desconstructed, till all that is left is the administrative state, and Project 2025/Agenda 47 will dismantle that.
The question is will Americans rise up or will they submit. My bet is on submission, I know the mentality of the people among whom I have lived 85 years
I have been decrying the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, birthing Limbaugh, etal, as the source of our political problems for years! Thank you for laying out the why's and wherefores of the monetization of thought since of millions of gullible Americans.
It is interesting that the corrupted bulwarks of democracy; capitalism and greed, and the power of the vote in the hands of the exploited ignoramuses, may well do, by the mass deployment of Yellow Journalism, what foreign powers could not do over the centuries; destroy America!
Is blame shifting to the media a fool’s errand? Does it beg the question or several of them? To be sure, Trump’s daily fire hose of falsehoods (lies) and fascism is so ubiquitous, so saturating, so “old”news in the daily that even Trump himself, realizing this, often ups the ante of outrageousness just to stay in the curl of the wave. Welcome to populism 24/7. The carnie barker gets more attention than the guy with a plan and a program. Who knew?
The playing field is what it is, is it not? If it can be reasonably argued that communication is maybe more than half the game, more than half of what a president’s job is….to communicate clearly and convincingly to citizens about what they are about, what they have done, and propose to do on a daily basis, then what level of “blame” belongs to Joe Biden and his “handlers”? Well before the 90 minutes on the evening of June 27, a whispering, teleprompter bound, press conference-less, Joe demonstrated that he fell way short of maximizing the power of the bully pulpit.
As true as Thom’s insightful lament about the media is, time is short. Arguing that the weather is hurting Joe Biden’s numbers will not change those numbers. Without a media filter, 48 million Americans watched some or all of the spectacle of their president almost literally come to pieces on national television, live and in real time. Tens of millions of those people do not read sub tack blogs, or any other media outlet as part of their daily lives. 70% before and 74% of voters polled after the debate believe Joe Biden is too old to be running for re-election to the presidency for FOUR more years.
The sports maxim “keep your eye on the ball” may be helpful here. For starters, the BALL ain’t the media.
You make a good point, Biden is not an effective communicator, but a competent facilitator of b iparisanship, but he is simply the avatar of the Democratic National Committee.
Biden is, in case, we forget, the race horse that they led by the bridle from the paddock to the starting gate in 2020, because they had nothing else, no one else, and he won the race because the other one was hobbled.
Any race horse could have beat the RNC stable's favorite in 2020, were that true today, were it true had not the race horse that won in 2020 not suffered from self inflicted wounds and flaws.
Do men become president because they won, or because the other side lost?
I maintain that in 2020 Trump lost, anyone could have beat Trump that election, that wasn't outright scary.
2024 is not 2020, this time the theocrats are totally organized and prepared, Republican legislatures have enacted laws, armed poll watchers have been recruited and trained, I would be surprised to see them wearing uniforms and arm bands.
Right Wing lawyers have prepared and refined briefs to be filed if the election doesn't go their way and will be waiting on court house steps.. Bannon even admitted it before going to jail, for a four month vacation.
And the Democratic party is caught up in circular firing squad, and it is all about ego's and careers with no concern, as far as I can see, for the future of the country, the party, the constituency.
In 2020 Biden won because 8 million people turned up to turn Trump out of office., but it was the Swing states that did the job, red states like Arizona , Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia that turned purple for one election.
That advantage is gone, thanks to voter suppression laws and planned actions.
We can only hope that the Muslims and black voters of MN, MI, PA, WN who have threatened to sit out the election or vote third party, were talking out the side of their mouths and have a come to Jesus or Allah moment,on Nov 5th, suddenly realizing that if they follow through, they are building loading ramps to their own cattle cars. This is no time to bitch about the past, because the only thing that really counts is the future.
As a person older than dirt, I lived during the time when the Fairness Doctrine was in practice… So if you will imagine sitting in front of a grainy B&W 16” screen on a Sunday Morning at 7:30AM while a guy in a suit reads a boring statement for about 3 minutes… That was the heyday of that policy.
The genuine beginning of the End of Democracy was the SCOTUS decision of “Citizens” United - that made money equivalent to speech
Exactly! So, new solutions must be found. We are hanging on by a thread, visa vice ill informed about equal informed electorate. Where and why did you and I learn, at least for the most part, the difference between shite and shinola?
Before Reagan, the news division was a loss leader, anyone who even mentioned a sponsor was fired.
Not news is part of the Infotainment division, and is a source of revenue, and the last thing anyone who wants to keep their paycheck and have a career wants to do is shit in their own messkit, by pissing off the egg laying goose.
"Six women who had professional dealings with him told me [Ronan Farrow] that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result."
n.b.: L.M's wife and he remain married, not withstanding all that's been reported.
If half of what's on the agenda to decimate meaningful education comes to pass, and it is chest deep in that effort now, it will take generations to restore. It further will take a collosal failure of social bonding which will be earmarked by unhinged violence very similar to the same miniaturized versions of mass casualties' shootings by people unhinged by the pressures of their own confusions that are happening, largely only in our country. The world watches in horror. Years ago, a simple remark by an MD associate hit me hard, dead center: "we live in a feel-good society". Beyond the attention I was paying to the prevalence to narcissism and it's metastatic growth, this enriched that. Narcissism, long before it's current perversion and expansions to include many distinctions and endless applications made effete by CEO demands, was simply the cautionary tale of the original myth--that emphasizing image over self was a life-changing toxicity. Messaging from corporate-influenced song and dance told us that endless feel-good replaces the balanced psychic realities recognized by experts. To feel bad was just wrong. If you are feeling bad, you are bad.
The massive chorus of advertising told us how to be happy. It worked, continues to work; we will drown
And maybe we won't. Gerald, you did not put a period on that last sentence. Fitting, because this situation we are in is the best education anyone could ask for.
it's time to raise a LOT of HOLY hell and keep on raising it until and unless coverage is adjusted to be fairer! Our fascists, aka the GOP, have been working the refs with increasing success; now we need to push back and keep on pushing!
I remember when, in eighth grade, Agnanostopoulos (aka VP Agnew) fired his first whining sally against a then-fairly-objective press, I felt a chill down the back of my neck, but I never dreamed their cheating would come to such a point as it hath done now!
I have noticed that the media will run an OMG story, then poll people who have heard or read the story, then report back that polls show that people say OMG. Then the cycle continues. But why is there an OMG story in the first place, and why do they poll on it? Easier than fact-checking, and also--more clicks!
Again, this piece is "right on the money!" And the problem is exponentially worse due to the repetition of lies perpetrated through social media algorithms, the dumbing down of American education, and spineless politicians relentlessly repeating these lies. And speaking of lies, "the big lie," is not that Trump won the 2020 election, it is that there is a "liberal bias" in the news.
Wow, if today's journalism is biased towards the liberals, can you imagine if they ever started to favor conservatism?
/sarcasm
Not surprisingly, Thom Hartmann delivers the most reasonable and well documented explanation of how and why our national media apparatus is failing us. Thom being a great translator of the seemingly unknown into the simply knowable isn't news, but what he delivers in today's Report certainly is.
And I'll end my comment with this tell all quote from Thom' piece:
"As we saw last week when The New York Times featured an editorial calling for its heavily Democratic readers not to vote and then altered the headline in response to public outrage, our pressure can alter media behavior.
It’s time to raise some hell!"
Absolutely true and every sane person’s blood should be boiling now. Canceling subscriptions to the NYT and WP is a start. But also sharing reports like this on social media can help undo the brainwashing of America. I am heartened by events in France and the UK. Let’s make it happen in the USA.
Chris ,
I was concerned about the tact to the right in France ( polls seemed to indicate) - - so it is refreshing to see that either the voters in France woke up , or the media just hyped it all up.
In any event, I share your call for the
USA to follow the example of voters in the UK & France .
I’ll take a breath and try to calm down- in the hope that the spell
Trump cast over so many of us
will be broken as it richly deserves.
The other thing we can do is spend our cable and paper subscription money on Substack subscriptions instead. There's lots of great, honest and thoughtful writing to be found and supported there. I am not going to cancel WaPo after reading this. Thanks Thom.
I am with you Dotty, except substack doesn't have an option for one time year subscription.The latest business model, being adopted by everyone it seems is to have one sign up for a recurring subscription,with the promise that you can cancel at any time, only problem is by the time you need to cancel or want to cancel, you forgot how. and a minimum subscription is $80, times that by the number of substacks to which you would subscribe, the add in the number of streaming services to which you subscribe, your anti virus, and I understand that now, you have to yearly subscribe to windows or it's office program, and how can you manage a budget (or does one now a day),much less eat, travel, cloth, warm, entertain without going into perpertual debt slavery.?
Fight back!
To sweep register more Democrats. On Saturday, FT6 sent 200,000 and Sunday 168,000 texts to GA. We are at it again today.
FT 6. Text Arcades every Thursday 3pm PT/6pm ET
The next training will be on Thursday 07/11 at 3pm PT at our Text Arcade, which requires a $25 donation to get 1400 texts.
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ft6arcade24 or Saturday Textbanks with the Union starting at 11am PT/ 2pm ET
Training will also be on Saturday 07/13 at 11am PT
https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/event/643009/
Not only is the mainstream media corrupt but the AM radio stations broadcasting right wing hate radio are as well. I think Trump is using the media to instill a lack of confidence in our voting process also.
Unlimited greed or capitalism always ends in a train wreck! Lying, intentionally ignorant, delusional, greedy Americans, 85% of whom claim they serve God, are going to reap what they have sown! Get prepared for the worst and hope for the best!
The thing about radio is that it is a form of media that can reach people in their cars and at work. Can't read or watch while driving. But they do put Fox or CNN on TV at bars and airports.
The owners of the media have no care other than their pockets. Their lack of care for the entire country make them unfit to be owners. All the more for Dems to campaign on the wrongs of the media and why they will not cover actual issues of import. The people have bought the idea that individuals with great riches are a good thing for a country. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most of their money goes to causes that have no impact in society. Even most of the winners of society fail to see that they support ideas that are simply wrong and their money supporting their issues are mostly a wast of time. Only one out of ten are real contributors to society in the long run. The other nine do not have the money to promote their ideas that can be successful because nobody knows that they will be. Even the rich try to find good ideas to support and fail because they get scammed even when the actors are being honest. Nobody knows who these people are. We are just not good at it. The only way to increase the success of society is to insure everyone gets enough to thrive. But you cannot have mudsill generating unearned millionaires as a consequence of making over half of American's poor. A top take rate of 94% for income and 50% or more for business is the only way to change the behavior of business to end mudsill and help society be one that everyone can thrive by a basic income for all.
There has got to be an Rx beyond running around panic hair-on-fire pointing 'it's not so!' Yet voters in the EU showing signs of awareness. Maybe humans' BS tolerance does have a limit. Bring The Blue Wave!
The structure of the EU and it's history is an impediment to a unitary executive, in America the impediments have been gradually desconstructed, till all that is left is the administrative state, and Project 2025/Agenda 47 will dismantle that.
The question is will Americans rise up or will they submit. My bet is on submission, I know the mentality of the people among whom I have lived 85 years
I trust that BS is like a disguise that tends to fall apart over time, revealing the liar inside.
I have been decrying the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, birthing Limbaugh, etal, as the source of our political problems for years! Thank you for laying out the why's and wherefores of the monetization of thought since of millions of gullible Americans.
It is interesting that the corrupted bulwarks of democracy; capitalism and greed, and the power of the vote in the hands of the exploited ignoramuses, may well do, by the mass deployment of Yellow Journalism, what foreign powers could not do over the centuries; destroy America!
Is blame shifting to the media a fool’s errand? Does it beg the question or several of them? To be sure, Trump’s daily fire hose of falsehoods (lies) and fascism is so ubiquitous, so saturating, so “old”news in the daily that even Trump himself, realizing this, often ups the ante of outrageousness just to stay in the curl of the wave. Welcome to populism 24/7. The carnie barker gets more attention than the guy with a plan and a program. Who knew?
The playing field is what it is, is it not? If it can be reasonably argued that communication is maybe more than half the game, more than half of what a president’s job is….to communicate clearly and convincingly to citizens about what they are about, what they have done, and propose to do on a daily basis, then what level of “blame” belongs to Joe Biden and his “handlers”? Well before the 90 minutes on the evening of June 27, a whispering, teleprompter bound, press conference-less, Joe demonstrated that he fell way short of maximizing the power of the bully pulpit.
As true as Thom’s insightful lament about the media is, time is short. Arguing that the weather is hurting Joe Biden’s numbers will not change those numbers. Without a media filter, 48 million Americans watched some or all of the spectacle of their president almost literally come to pieces on national television, live and in real time. Tens of millions of those people do not read sub tack blogs, or any other media outlet as part of their daily lives. 70% before and 74% of voters polled after the debate believe Joe Biden is too old to be running for re-election to the presidency for FOUR more years.
The sports maxim “keep your eye on the ball” may be helpful here. For starters, the BALL ain’t the media.
You make a good point, Biden is not an effective communicator, but a competent facilitator of b iparisanship, but he is simply the avatar of the Democratic National Committee.
Biden is, in case, we forget, the race horse that they led by the bridle from the paddock to the starting gate in 2020, because they had nothing else, no one else, and he won the race because the other one was hobbled.
Any race horse could have beat the RNC stable's favorite in 2020, were that true today, were it true had not the race horse that won in 2020 not suffered from self inflicted wounds and flaws.
Do men become president because they won, or because the other side lost?
I maintain that in 2020 Trump lost, anyone could have beat Trump that election, that wasn't outright scary.
2024 is not 2020, this time the theocrats are totally organized and prepared, Republican legislatures have enacted laws, armed poll watchers have been recruited and trained, I would be surprised to see them wearing uniforms and arm bands.
Right Wing lawyers have prepared and refined briefs to be filed if the election doesn't go their way and will be waiting on court house steps.. Bannon even admitted it before going to jail, for a four month vacation.
And the Democratic party is caught up in circular firing squad, and it is all about ego's and careers with no concern, as far as I can see, for the future of the country, the party, the constituency.
In 2020 Biden won because 8 million people turned up to turn Trump out of office., but it was the Swing states that did the job, red states like Arizona , Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia that turned purple for one election.
That advantage is gone, thanks to voter suppression laws and planned actions.
We can only hope that the Muslims and black voters of MN, MI, PA, WN who have threatened to sit out the election or vote third party, were talking out the side of their mouths and have a come to Jesus or Allah moment,on Nov 5th, suddenly realizing that if they follow through, they are building loading ramps to their own cattle cars. This is no time to bitch about the past, because the only thing that really counts is the future.
Scotty, substance, Biden's story, is not getting out.
And where does that buck stop?
If we don't bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and fast, is there any hope?
As a person older than dirt, I lived during the time when the Fairness Doctrine was in practice… So if you will imagine sitting in front of a grainy B&W 16” screen on a Sunday Morning at 7:30AM while a guy in a suit reads a boring statement for about 3 minutes… That was the heyday of that policy.
The genuine beginning of the End of Democracy was the SCOTUS decision of “Citizens” United - that made money equivalent to speech
The fairness doctrine is a good start, but it only applied to broadcast. Many more people get their opinions online these days.
Exactly! So, new solutions must be found. We are hanging on by a thread, visa vice ill informed about equal informed electorate. Where and why did you and I learn, at least for the most part, the difference between shite and shinola?
There are no problems, only solutions! From the guy who wrote the song "imagine", John Lennon
No, And chance of it coming back are near zero.
Before Reagan, the news division was a loss leader, anyone who even mentioned a sponsor was fired.
Not news is part of the Infotainment division, and is a source of revenue, and the last thing anyone who wants to keep their paycheck and have a career wants to do is shit in their own messkit, by pissing off the egg laying goose.
Both works for me!
Brainwashing for Fun and Profit.
By: Leslie "Karma Came for Me" Moonves
"Six women who had professional dealings with him told me [Ronan Farrow] that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result."
n.b.: L.M's wife and he remain married, not withstanding all that's been reported.
It appears that his wife had a come to Jesus moment to cope with his constant sexual harassment of women
Shame on the corporate media!
If half of what's on the agenda to decimate meaningful education comes to pass, and it is chest deep in that effort now, it will take generations to restore. It further will take a collosal failure of social bonding which will be earmarked by unhinged violence very similar to the same miniaturized versions of mass casualties' shootings by people unhinged by the pressures of their own confusions that are happening, largely only in our country. The world watches in horror. Years ago, a simple remark by an MD associate hit me hard, dead center: "we live in a feel-good society". Beyond the attention I was paying to the prevalence to narcissism and it's metastatic growth, this enriched that. Narcissism, long before it's current perversion and expansions to include many distinctions and endless applications made effete by CEO demands, was simply the cautionary tale of the original myth--that emphasizing image over self was a life-changing toxicity. Messaging from corporate-influenced song and dance told us that endless feel-good replaces the balanced psychic realities recognized by experts. To feel bad was just wrong. If you are feeling bad, you are bad.
The massive chorus of advertising told us how to be happy. It worked, continues to work; we will drown
And maybe we won't. Gerald, you did not put a period on that last sentence. Fitting, because this situation we are in is the best education anyone could ask for.
Let's see where it lands.
it's time to raise a LOT of HOLY hell and keep on raising it until and unless coverage is adjusted to be fairer! Our fascists, aka the GOP, have been working the refs with increasing success; now we need to push back and keep on pushing!
I remember when, in eighth grade, Agnanostopoulos (aka VP Agnew) fired his first whining sally against a then-fairly-objective press, I felt a chill down the back of my neck, but I never dreamed their cheating would come to such a point as it hath done now!
Excellent piece
I have noticed that the media will run an OMG story, then poll people who have heard or read the story, then report back that polls show that people say OMG. Then the cycle continues. But why is there an OMG story in the first place, and why do they poll on it? Easier than fact-checking, and also--more clicks!