A conversation between Jeff Zucker and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen removes all doubt: our hated president is a beloved commodity to network executives
Matt Taibbi just changed my opinion on something important—again.
That’s why I’m here—for a legitimate challenge. My brain just exploded and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it whenever I hear another story in the media. What else have I missed?
What a sorry state of affairs the CNNs of the world are. I'm thankful that in an era where more and more media outlets are proving their lack of integrity, we have increasingly lonely yet committed voices in the wind such as Matt.
Nobody puts a gun to our heads saying we have to watch this shit. I mean really. There's a point where people have to take personal responsibility for their own minds. Most of these people on TV and in the media are pimples on the butt of America. They're hilarious spectacles of themselves -- gapeworthy as the animated gluttons of a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. Dogs have more self control. Cats have more self possession. Reptiles have higher ethics. They're psychic bats whose method of wordly navigation is to emit their own sounds and hear their echos as they bounce off us. Why on earth does anybody care what they think? About anything? Oh, well, "they're in charge of our media" someone says. Not really. If you -- the citizen -- were in charge of your own mind, they wouldn't be in charge of anything but a haircut and makeup session.
Having said all that, I'm voting for Trump because I think at a deeply unconscious level he's not a born killer. He's not a psychopath. He's not possessed. He's not a form of Roman theater where the deaths were real slaves killed on stage. He's Greek theater where all the killing was done offstage and only by report and metaphor and that made it more potent as an art form. It's acting, not acting out. It is a performance but a performance that knows it is. Many of the others, many of the critics, they're not acting but acting out as puppets of jealousy, of lust, of sanctimony, of entitlement, wounded hubris-- and all these demons are real. The demons show their faces through their faces, twisted in grotesque emotional masks hovering invisibly superimposed on the skin but visible to mind-sight [Comment editor's note: Did anyone read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,Ohio where he had a short story about the grotesque faces that would come into his mind at night? I hereby offer 100 magical bonus dollars as a prize to anyone who does know what I'm talking about! No lie.]. Now back to my comment: You can see the demons now all across the circus of "public life". Hovering looking for minds and bodies to jump into and feasting like flies on the energies of those they've entered. It is really scary sometimes -- how the universe works. You really do need take care of your own soul and not watch so much TV..
This is from an article at the Daily Beast by someone named David Giffels.
"Trumbull County (Ohio), where the Lordstown plant is located, went 51 percent for Trump in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent, the first time since Richard Nixon that the county had voted in favor of a Republican presidential candidate. Four years before, Barack Obama had taken Trumbull by 23 points. Every person in the region who told me they’d voted for Trump said their previous vote had been for Obama, whose picture—snapped during his presidency when he made a visit to the Lordstown shop floor—still hung in the local union hall."
This is what partisan Democrats who look at Biden as some kind of sane alternative to Trump completely miss. It's what limousine liberals who tweeter 'the resistance" from their mansions in Hollywood wouldn't understand if you tutored them for a year. It's what all those glorified & overpaid teleprompter readers at CNN completely and, in my opinion, willfully miss as they shift the Trump narrative to one of racism.
It wasn't "racist white America" that supported Trump it was working class people who had been screwed raw by the Democratic Party since Bill "I'd like diddle your underage daughter" Clinton
stood next to Al "If my lips are moving I'm lying" Gore as they told everyone how NAFTA would cause jobs to fall from the sky. They just left out the small fact that those jobs would be falling from the sky over Mexico & China.
We are literally between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
I don't really see how any of this ends well.
And if I say I have a really bad feeling about our future as a country that would be a monumental understatement.
Wonder if that CNN "media reporter" sniveling turd Brian Stelter will cover this? That's a joke, obviously. IMO, the biggest media story of 2016 was the AP calling the Dem nomination the night BEFORE the California primary, based on anonymous Superdelegate sources. He never covered that, either. Even the venerable Diane Rehm here on NPR in DC said in effect that was an appalling move by AP. #NeverForget #TGIF
I've been researching the history of the CIA and our media and...it's really no surprise why things are the way they are. Combine the greed of the media with the carte blanche access the CIA/intelligence apparatus has to our newsrooms and you get an amoral media willing to push any flimsy story as long as it rakes in the dollars. In 2013, the Smith-Mundt Act was rescinded. Look into that and the 2016 Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. It's legal to push fake news and propaganda to the American people if it's in the 'best interest of the country'.
“Just listen to the tape. As a business, they’re more than fond of “the boss.” They just can’t have us knowing it.”
While earlier reports from the left countered with the fact that Tucker Carlson has even more sway with President Trump, that take missed the point.
The key takeaway here is the colossal public manipulation by CNN, and by extension all the networks that profit by emotionally manipulating their audience to cheer and jeer in unison.
The end result is the erosion of democracy - the erosion of a sound basis for decision-making. That’s why the ongoing trial of Julian Assange, right now in the U.K., has an information blackout in the U.S. His devotion to transparency would upend the 24/7 propaganda information environment we find ourselves inhabiting in the U.S. (That information is a commodity to WikiLeaks only in so far as it is something they give away freely to the world’s public.)
Given the snow job we received on Trump, who do you think made the American people hate Julian Assange?
I just want to write and say thank-you Matt for your outstanding analysis of Trump and the media. I've learned a lot from reading it. Your analysis of the causes for Trump's popularity and his destruction of the remainder of the Republican field (and subsequently the Clinton campaign) has been insightful and easy to follow. In particular, I find your analysis of the parallels between his debate style and the theatrics of pro-wrestling to be particularly interesting and insightful. The notion that Trump does not know how to debate is foolish, given his obvious talent for dominating staged competitive events like this (and the fact he has been doing it for decades). It is fascinating to read this history with CNN and see what is happening in the executive levels of these media companies.
I know you're a big fan of old-school gonzo journos like Hunter S. Thompson. I can't speak to you being quite as wild as him, but I prefer your writing and analysis, so don't change a thing. I personally think you have earned your way into the pantheon of journalists who will be remembered beyond their own active years, and will stand as a template for young journalists of the future (at least those rare ones who decide to pursue the profession honestly, instead of as media propagandists). Your analysis of modern politics and media has the ability to cut through the propaganda and noise and remind people of underlying truths that others try desperately to obscure.
The fact that I just gave $50 to the guy I have almost never agreed with and had been taught to loathe since (almost) 19 years ago today is so 2020, I almost can't wrap my head around the hope it inspires for our future as Americans.
I'm starting to think Russian interference in our elections might be a good thing to help counter the U.S. media's interference and manipulation of our elections
Ugh... so all this brainwashing TDS propaganda was so they could get ratings. And we now have a completely divided America because of their bs propaganda. I didn’t think I could hate the left wing media more. I blame them for all of this lack of civility in America. You have people with TDS attacking children for god’s sake! The left wing media is absolutely evil.
This guy is a poor second to Roger Ailes who didn't have to pretend where he stood. Negative coverage of Trump's provocative ,often stupid ,statements only makes them more effective. McLuhan had it right...it's the medium not the message. Having been the star of the Apprentice, Trump understood that better than any of the candidates. His only problem is governing..especially when there's a crisis. Then it doesn't matter because the public has to deal with the crisis in their everyday lives. Trump's BS won't cut it.
Doesn't this cut to the core of the problem. Politicians, media corps., overpaid teleprompter readers, all have a hidden agenda. To the public they're one thing, behind closed doors they're another.
I saw Joe Biden's ad this morning where he "vows" to "make corporations & the wealthy pay their fair share." Sounds good.
Same bullshit Hillary prattled on about. Then came the Podesta emails & we know her "vow" was political theater for deplorable rubes like me. She really had no intention of doing any of that. I suspect Joe Bob's vow is just as empty. Obama wasn't any different.
Trumps' corruption needs shouted from every virtual hilltop in America.
Joe Bob's corruption isn't really corruption &, anyway, getting rid of Trump is more important.
The media gleefully plays along. And those that don't , like Julian Assange, must be dangled by their testicles before they're publicly beheaded.
I really don't know how people watch TV news anyway. I disconnected my TV from the outside world about 6 years ago. I only see CNN at work and it is, at best, an annoying joke.
They give no history or context with their stories. Everything happens in a vacuum.
When Covid was raging, they had a third of their screen taken up with the Covid counter. As soon as the rioting began, the Covid counter completely disappeared...until Trump started holding rallies then it returned with a vengeance.
As things burned, CNN ran "news specials" that could have been subtitled "Why the cops suck."
Funny, during Occupy, I don't remember CNN running any specials subtitled "How bankers & the wealthy raped America's economy during a time of war."
It all leads me to believe that the upper classes don't give a shit about power grabs among society's bottom feeders, they just don't want anyone looking upwards at them.
CNN's reporting on the Tulsa Massacre was equally suspect. They acted like this was some hidden horror from America's past. I think I read about it 30 years ago. It was hidden alright. Hidden in books that no one reads. Americans have an annoying tendency to need their information spoon fed to them.
Of course, while mentioning the Tulsa Massacre, they conveniently left out other massacres like The Ludlow Massacre or the WW1 vets who were fired upon when they marched on Washington during the Depression.
In fact, violence was what the upper classes always used to keep the bottom feeders in line. It would be more remarkable if black folk weren't massacred at some point.
Of course, violence leads to bad press.
So now the wealthy just buy everything & everyone that could oppose them.
The media, politicians, watchdog groups. The American Diabetes Association accepts large donations from candy & soda manufacturers. They aren't alone. In fact, that appears to be business as usual.
Don't know the solution.
What I do know is neither Biden or Trump will offer any.
Matt Taibbi just changed my opinion on something important—again.
That’s why I’m here—for a legitimate challenge. My brain just exploded and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it whenever I hear another story in the media. What else have I missed?
What a sorry state of affairs the CNNs of the world are. I'm thankful that in an era where more and more media outlets are proving their lack of integrity, we have increasingly lonely yet committed voices in the wind such as Matt.
Nobody puts a gun to our heads saying we have to watch this shit. I mean really. There's a point where people have to take personal responsibility for their own minds. Most of these people on TV and in the media are pimples on the butt of America. They're hilarious spectacles of themselves -- gapeworthy as the animated gluttons of a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. Dogs have more self control. Cats have more self possession. Reptiles have higher ethics. They're psychic bats whose method of wordly navigation is to emit their own sounds and hear their echos as they bounce off us. Why on earth does anybody care what they think? About anything? Oh, well, "they're in charge of our media" someone says. Not really. If you -- the citizen -- were in charge of your own mind, they wouldn't be in charge of anything but a haircut and makeup session.
Having said all that, I'm voting for Trump because I think at a deeply unconscious level he's not a born killer. He's not a psychopath. He's not possessed. He's not a form of Roman theater where the deaths were real slaves killed on stage. He's Greek theater where all the killing was done offstage and only by report and metaphor and that made it more potent as an art form. It's acting, not acting out. It is a performance but a performance that knows it is. Many of the others, many of the critics, they're not acting but acting out as puppets of jealousy, of lust, of sanctimony, of entitlement, wounded hubris-- and all these demons are real. The demons show their faces through their faces, twisted in grotesque emotional masks hovering invisibly superimposed on the skin but visible to mind-sight [Comment editor's note: Did anyone read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,Ohio where he had a short story about the grotesque faces that would come into his mind at night? I hereby offer 100 magical bonus dollars as a prize to anyone who does know what I'm talking about! No lie.]. Now back to my comment: You can see the demons now all across the circus of "public life". Hovering looking for minds and bodies to jump into and feasting like flies on the energies of those they've entered. It is really scary sometimes -- how the universe works. You really do need take care of your own soul and not watch so much TV..
Thank you and -- CNN and other corporate media not a word about the torture of true and invaluable journalist -- Julian Assange...
This is from an article at the Daily Beast by someone named David Giffels.
"Trumbull County (Ohio), where the Lordstown plant is located, went 51 percent for Trump in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent, the first time since Richard Nixon that the county had voted in favor of a Republican presidential candidate. Four years before, Barack Obama had taken Trumbull by 23 points. Every person in the region who told me they’d voted for Trump said their previous vote had been for Obama, whose picture—snapped during his presidency when he made a visit to the Lordstown shop floor—still hung in the local union hall."
This is what partisan Democrats who look at Biden as some kind of sane alternative to Trump completely miss. It's what limousine liberals who tweeter 'the resistance" from their mansions in Hollywood wouldn't understand if you tutored them for a year. It's what all those glorified & overpaid teleprompter readers at CNN completely and, in my opinion, willfully miss as they shift the Trump narrative to one of racism.
It wasn't "racist white America" that supported Trump it was working class people who had been screwed raw by the Democratic Party since Bill "I'd like diddle your underage daughter" Clinton
stood next to Al "If my lips are moving I'm lying" Gore as they told everyone how NAFTA would cause jobs to fall from the sky. They just left out the small fact that those jobs would be falling from the sky over Mexico & China.
We are literally between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
I don't really see how any of this ends well.
And if I say I have a really bad feeling about our future as a country that would be a monumental understatement.
Wonder if that CNN "media reporter" sniveling turd Brian Stelter will cover this? That's a joke, obviously. IMO, the biggest media story of 2016 was the AP calling the Dem nomination the night BEFORE the California primary, based on anonymous Superdelegate sources. He never covered that, either. Even the venerable Diane Rehm here on NPR in DC said in effect that was an appalling move by AP. #NeverForget #TGIF
I've been researching the history of the CIA and our media and...it's really no surprise why things are the way they are. Combine the greed of the media with the carte blanche access the CIA/intelligence apparatus has to our newsrooms and you get an amoral media willing to push any flimsy story as long as it rakes in the dollars. In 2013, the Smith-Mundt Act was rescinded. Look into that and the 2016 Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. It's legal to push fake news and propaganda to the American people if it's in the 'best interest of the country'.
I love Matt’s ending -
“Just listen to the tape. As a business, they’re more than fond of “the boss.” They just can’t have us knowing it.”
While earlier reports from the left countered with the fact that Tucker Carlson has even more sway with President Trump, that take missed the point.
The key takeaway here is the colossal public manipulation by CNN, and by extension all the networks that profit by emotionally manipulating their audience to cheer and jeer in unison.
The end result is the erosion of democracy - the erosion of a sound basis for decision-making. That’s why the ongoing trial of Julian Assange, right now in the U.K., has an information blackout in the U.S. His devotion to transparency would upend the 24/7 propaganda information environment we find ourselves inhabiting in the U.S. (That information is a commodity to WikiLeaks only in so far as it is something they give away freely to the world’s public.)
Given the snow job we received on Trump, who do you think made the American people hate Julian Assange?
I'm anxious to see how MSM will spin this story. Oh, the possibilities!... but instead I know it will be ignored.
I just want to write and say thank-you Matt for your outstanding analysis of Trump and the media. I've learned a lot from reading it. Your analysis of the causes for Trump's popularity and his destruction of the remainder of the Republican field (and subsequently the Clinton campaign) has been insightful and easy to follow. In particular, I find your analysis of the parallels between his debate style and the theatrics of pro-wrestling to be particularly interesting and insightful. The notion that Trump does not know how to debate is foolish, given his obvious talent for dominating staged competitive events like this (and the fact he has been doing it for decades). It is fascinating to read this history with CNN and see what is happening in the executive levels of these media companies.
I know you're a big fan of old-school gonzo journos like Hunter S. Thompson. I can't speak to you being quite as wild as him, but I prefer your writing and analysis, so don't change a thing. I personally think you have earned your way into the pantheon of journalists who will be remembered beyond their own active years, and will stand as a template for young journalists of the future (at least those rare ones who decide to pursue the profession honestly, instead of as media propagandists). Your analysis of modern politics and media has the ability to cut through the propaganda and noise and remind people of underlying truths that others try desperately to obscure.
The fact that I just gave $50 to the guy I have almost never agreed with and had been taught to loathe since (almost) 19 years ago today is so 2020, I almost can't wrap my head around the hope it inspires for our future as Americans.
I'm starting to think Russian interference in our elections might be a good thing to help counter the U.S. media's interference and manipulation of our elections
Ugh... so all this brainwashing TDS propaganda was so they could get ratings. And we now have a completely divided America because of their bs propaganda. I didn’t think I could hate the left wing media more. I blame them for all of this lack of civility in America. You have people with TDS attacking children for god’s sake! The left wing media is absolutely evil.
This guy is a poor second to Roger Ailes who didn't have to pretend where he stood. Negative coverage of Trump's provocative ,often stupid ,statements only makes them more effective. McLuhan had it right...it's the medium not the message. Having been the star of the Apprentice, Trump understood that better than any of the candidates. His only problem is governing..especially when there's a crisis. Then it doesn't matter because the public has to deal with the crisis in their everyday lives. Trump's BS won't cut it.
Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar,
You're gonna go far,
You're gonna fly high,
You're never gonna die,
You're gonna make it if you try,
They're gonna love you.
Doesn't this cut to the core of the problem. Politicians, media corps., overpaid teleprompter readers, all have a hidden agenda. To the public they're one thing, behind closed doors they're another.
I saw Joe Biden's ad this morning where he "vows" to "make corporations & the wealthy pay their fair share." Sounds good.
Same bullshit Hillary prattled on about. Then came the Podesta emails & we know her "vow" was political theater for deplorable rubes like me. She really had no intention of doing any of that. I suspect Joe Bob's vow is just as empty. Obama wasn't any different.
Trumps' corruption needs shouted from every virtual hilltop in America.
Joe Bob's corruption isn't really corruption &, anyway, getting rid of Trump is more important.
The media gleefully plays along. And those that don't , like Julian Assange, must be dangled by their testicles before they're publicly beheaded.
I really don't know how people watch TV news anyway. I disconnected my TV from the outside world about 6 years ago. I only see CNN at work and it is, at best, an annoying joke.
They give no history or context with their stories. Everything happens in a vacuum.
When Covid was raging, they had a third of their screen taken up with the Covid counter. As soon as the rioting began, the Covid counter completely disappeared...until Trump started holding rallies then it returned with a vengeance.
As things burned, CNN ran "news specials" that could have been subtitled "Why the cops suck."
Funny, during Occupy, I don't remember CNN running any specials subtitled "How bankers & the wealthy raped America's economy during a time of war."
It all leads me to believe that the upper classes don't give a shit about power grabs among society's bottom feeders, they just don't want anyone looking upwards at them.
CNN's reporting on the Tulsa Massacre was equally suspect. They acted like this was some hidden horror from America's past. I think I read about it 30 years ago. It was hidden alright. Hidden in books that no one reads. Americans have an annoying tendency to need their information spoon fed to them.
Of course, while mentioning the Tulsa Massacre, they conveniently left out other massacres like The Ludlow Massacre or the WW1 vets who were fired upon when they marched on Washington during the Depression.
In fact, violence was what the upper classes always used to keep the bottom feeders in line. It would be more remarkable if black folk weren't massacred at some point.
Of course, violence leads to bad press.
So now the wealthy just buy everything & everyone that could oppose them.
The media, politicians, watchdog groups. The American Diabetes Association accepts large donations from candy & soda manufacturers. They aren't alone. In fact, that appears to be business as usual.
Don't know the solution.
What I do know is neither Biden or Trump will offer any.
Just more bullshit.