
…anything exciting happen yesterday?
‘Frustrated and upset,’ Trump goes silent, then seethes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/04/trump-arraignment-speech-2024-campaign/
Way to go!
Liberals will win control of Wisconsin Supreme Court, CNN projects|https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/04/politics/wisconsin-election-supreme-court-results/index.html
Today in Turtle Content:
Have a great day!
Excellent video selection. The guy on the bike is MAGA Shaman hot.
In defense of my fellow New Yorkers and whatever tourists happened to have come for the spectacle, you’ll notice that MTG was swarmed with people armed with mikes and professional cameras, so that was a media mob. Notice how on the other side of the street “civilians” are just kind of standing around and only at the end do some people pull out their phones because people nowadays will video anything.
Another account I read said that Marge tried to hold a rally and that only lasted about ten minutes before she was forced to flee, I think that’s what we’re seeing here, amid a barrage of “Fuck you”s. I also read that George Santos showed up, why not, and he was similarly driven off, with one bystander screaming at him, “Did you get a law degree in the last two weeks you haven’t told us about yet?”
And then the tortoise, what more need be said?
Also, there was a wedding!
What’s with the whistles? I’m assuming the cops weren’t using them.
…not sure if it’s true but I read something that suggested the anti- crowd got hold of a bunch because the pro- crowd was handing them out…or maybe just a specific member of the pro- crowd?
…then used them to, among other things, drown out the sound of MTG…which seems like a bright idea, anyway
Apparently a MAGA dumbass brought whistles to “support” Moron Tempest Garbage and became a victim of unwitting unfriendly friendly “fire.”
Yet another perfect example of how right wingers can never think ahead.
…the wisconsin thing seems like a positive…or at least a result that sidestepped something that would have been pretty dire
…what with various red states removing elected officials from their posts & generally embracing the whole democracy-can-go-fuck-itself approach a vote that went against them which they appear to be willing to honor is a bit of a relief?
Very positive! The anti-democracy oligarchs thought this was the way to win back the white house without actually winning. Now they may finally get rid of the gerrymandered districts or at least count votes? That is why they spent soooo much money on that election!
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/spending-in-wisconsin-supreme-court-race-tops-42-million/
It’s worth noting that most of the voting occurred after Trump first started screaming about the Bragg indictment.
There was no big bump in GOP voter turnout, and the GOP traditionally has an advantage in off year election turnout.
It’s just another bit of anecdata, but for now the GOP seems to be looking at softening support. What that means in terms of desperate measures is hard to say, but I could see anything from lone wolf attacks, billionaires tripling their insane ad buys, to flat out constitutional crises. Or things I can’t even guess.
…given the result…& the part where the campaigns spent an order of magnitude more than has been the case for any race that could be considered a peer…I’d certainly be interested in anything that passes for a decent post-mortem…because if there’s things the dems got right in that instance they could surely be a valuable thing to adapt/adopt in upcoming contests?
Extremely positive. Until SCOTUS invalidates elections — which let’s be honest, is more of an eventuality than we want to admit — this ensures that Wisconsin will not be hijacked by a Mango-friendly court come 2024.
Nope, the WI thing is an incredibly mixed bag, unfortunately.
They DID elect the D candidate to the State Supreme Court… buuuuut in typical dumbass fashion, they also ended up electing the R-side candidate to the state senate… whiiiiich may negate the court election win🙃😖😱
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wisconsin-republican-supermajority-state-senate_n_642daef2e4b0c2da15047a40
The douchecanoe elected to the state senate is *already* on record, apparently, saying he’s willing to vote to impeach the new Justice🙄
…well…that sucks
…but good to know…so thanks for that part?
The Commentariat keep forgetting that you don’t show all of your evidence to a Grand Jury. You only show them enough to shoe probable cause.
They are not forgetting, they just do not know, much if anything. Combine shunning education with only entering the political arena with trump and you don’t get political geniuses, or legal geniuses, even if they try to play them on the internet.
There’s a gross imbalance in coverage of the press between hype and speculation on the one hand and facts on the other.
For weeks now we’ve been getting pure guesswork about what, exactly, is in the charges. And then OJ-style video following Trump’s plane, then at the courthouse a gigantic scrum of press that, as Cousin Matt pointed out, was a pure media mob with practically no real people.
Defenders of the press will moan about how “this is the news, they HAVE to cover it.”
And then you get this at the first opportunity to get real details and facts:
They aren’t creating a mob because they have to, they’re doing it because they choose to. They’re shortchanging the facts because they don’t care.
…at some point yesterday I stumbled over a thread from a journalist who spent the day camped out in the street & the media definitely outnumbered other people for the first part of the day…the pro- & anti- crowds had to be separated at some point, with most of the press tending to the pro- side…which was more numerous until later in the day…& had more attention-seeking types…like a hefty fella who was in a set of flag dungarees once he pulled off the coat he’d covered them up with…or the brash MAGA-hat-ed lady that tried to damage a massive anti-trump banner than had been laid out on the street & generally seemed to be trying very hard to be in as many videos as possible
…by the end of the day it looked like both pro- & anti- crowds outnumbered the press corps…but the scrums & scuffles I saw footage of seemed about 50/50 just camera-toting types (like the final stages of getting MTG out of there) & police separating opposing demonstrators
…most of which seemed like par for the course…not to mention pretty innocuous on a scale that stretches to jan 6th at this point…it does seem like a lot of press for not a lot of stuff happening but there were crews from all over the world & that’s going to add up…compared to the media set up for some of the royal funeral shit last year it was comparatively modest, even?
Oh, you can always find other things which are even more overcovered, like that murder case last month involving the guy I’ve already forgotten about.
But to get back to what Lemmy and AWhit were talking about, people aren’t going to know what’s going on if it’s all drowned in meaningless video and speculation while actual information is barely touched.
Going back to the 2016 campaign, the press rationalized its coverage by saying that buried in the endless video and shouting pundits around “Lock her up” there was a tiny percentage of actual information about things like education and climate. But there’s simply no way to accept that kind of rationalization.
It’s the equivalent of a bad professor rationalizing failing 90% of their students when the students can’t follow interminable lectures, because buried in all of the trivia, digressions, and flat out bad information is a little nugget of truth in one of the assigned texts that could be used.
When 1% of the class fails, that’s on the students. When the bulk of the students fail, that’s on the professor.
Because guess what people watch on cable news if you give them two options: a 20-minute sober legal analysis featuring three middle-aged talking heads or 2-minute live hits of weirdos swinging at each other in the streets followed by breathless speculation. You might say you want the former, but I guarantee you the latter will get more viewers. And ultimately, TV companies need eyeballs to make money, so, voila.
This is slightly less the case in other media forms, but the pressure is the same everywhere. Good news coverage is a little boring! And it requires an audience willing to accept that, and cable news simply won’t ever do it.
Here’s the thing — people aren’t watching the status quo either. Ratings keep dropping.
Defenders of the status quo of the press act like it’s an either/or situation. Either it’s boring, sober discussions or it’s the coverage of the narrow set of issues that gets covered.
That’s just wrong. Both the format and the content are choices that the networks and papers are making. And they’re literally doing the exact same things they were doing when ratings started dropping decades ago.
To give just one example, Wolf Blitzer has been the face of CNN since the 1990. 33 years! That’s a dozen years longer than Walter Cronkite at CBS. And while people to this very day can easily talk about different things Cronkite did on the air — four decades after he retired — nobody can remember anything about Wolf Blitzer at all. Not Covid, not 1/6, not 9/11….. there is nothing he’s done that grips anyone with a fraction of, say, Cronkite and Tet.
At the same time that TV news started spiraling the drain in terms of viewership, TV entertainment execs realized that there was an untapped audience for more than Urkel and the Olsen twins, and launched prestige TV.
Entertainment execs realized that simply sticking to the old formats and content was a losers game, and they made major changes to improve what they were doing. They didn’t even know what they were doing. They hired new people, they took risks, and figured it out along the way.
News execs decided let’s stick with Wolf Blitzer.
On the print side, 2016 was a disaster, and years later, we’re still reading Maggie Haberman. And she’s still terrible. You can’t remember anything she wrote about Trump and the leadup to Covid in late 2019 through early 2020, or Trump’s plotting prior to 1/6, because she literally wrote nothing. Nothing.
In contrast, with Watergate the NY Times initially screwed up its coverage when Scotty Reston took Kissinger’s assurances in the late spring of 1972 that there was nothing going on. And it was terrible.
But it took them six months to can the DC editor and put new reporters outside the DC bureau on the case, and they turned it around.
Vietnam was slower, but it still only took the Times four years to fix its coverage. We’re on year eight of their Trump failure, and there is no sign of course correction.
Form and content, no changes, a miserable status quo. There are a world of other options out there to try, but execs won’t change.
You’re arguing an entirely different point here, and one that I don’t disagree with. But that’s not my point, and really has nothing to do with my point.
Comparing Wolf Blitzer to Walter Cronkite is insane not because Blitzer isn’t fit to hold his jock strap (though that’s true) but because 15% of the country was watching Cronkite on a nightly basis. Blitzer at his absolute peak was reaching 2-3% of the country, and in non-war non-election night situations, more like 0.2% of the country. He doesn’t have the reach and it’s not just because CNN sucks or he sucks (again true) but because NOTHING has the reach anymore. You say that “executives made choices and took chances” but they all turned to cheaper reality TV and game shows. Even prestige TV isn’t really popular. “Mad Men” is one of my favorite shows of all time but it would never have survived on a network because its ratings were meager. It had the right fans, much like “Succession” does now, so people talked about it a lot, but those shows wouldn’t have been in the top 50 in the ratings 25 years ago.
You keep talking about Times’ errors in Trump coverage and again, I agree they’ve done a bad job journalistically, but 2016 was in fact NOT a bad year for the Times. Subscriptions spiked! And I know that many of their best-read stories over the past decade are Trump-related (as well as some of their garbage op-eds!) Again, journalistically, they did a poor job with Trump, but in terms of creating interest? They did a bang-up job. And guess what? That’s what corporations want. You don’t have to try and play Kremlinologist to decode what Reporter X thinks or what Editor Z might be pushing for. If they do stories that get a huge return, they are going to do more of those stories. And Trump stories have gotten a huge return. That’s a problem that all the good journalism in the world cannot fix. And it’s as true for the Times as it is for cable news (which, again, has never been all that good at journalism) as it is for local papers as it is for local TV news, etc. etc. etc. and onward all the way down to insane Facebook neighborhood groups.
Newspapers used to be part of the entertainment landscape because there wasn’t information readily available in other places. But not unlike trains, ocean liners and movie theaters, the industry has changed a lot, and the reasons for that are not just “bad journalism” — and simply saying that repeatedly without considering the broader issues is, itself, missing a full continent for forests to focus on some real gnarly-looking trees.
…weirdly that reminds me of a thing that happened when I was at university…one of the course units I took was taught by a professor who had been doing it for thirty-odd years & mine was their last one…for whatever reason, either because they always did or just because they were de-mob happy this one time…the exam paper had no questions that could be answered if you’d only taken notes from the lectures/tutorials…you needed to have looked at past papers & done some independent reading…which wasn’t hard since the whole thing was about a single poet with a manageable body of work…& I tended to do that sort of thing as a matter of course…so I was somewhat taken aback when other people came out of the exam distraught & started lodging appeals with the faculty to avoid tanking their chances of getting a 1st/2nd class degree overall
…due diligence…much like common courtesy…seems to be a term people don’t really consider overmuch before claiming they check that box?
On the other hand, I’ve known professors who tested completely differently from the syllabus and lectures, and then justified it on the grounds that people just should have known.
Literally questions about people or works that were never covered.
What people deduced is that the professor just pulled an old test from a previous year and was too lazy or incompetent to update it to match the lesson plan they followed.
In theory, yes, students could have done independent research outside of the assignments. But when you consider that would mean an almost infinite amount of work to cover every possibility, and they had no way of knowing that was even going to happen, that’s just nuts.
…as it goes, in a subject I didn’t take but for the same set of exams I did take to qualify for my spot at uni people I knew had a variation of that problem…except what it boiled down to was a bit less straightforward
…there’s a syllabus…but not enough hours in the two year (for that block of exams) timetable to cover all of it…so the teachers have to take a view on which bits to teach so that eventually out of half a dozen essay questions the student sitting the exam is prepared to provide an answer to at least two…since that’s how many answers they need to write up out of the six they can choose from
…they did the same teaching they had in previous years…& very probably went back to in subsequent years…but the paper presented to my cohort had six questions of which only one touched on material they’d been taught…a statistical improbability the school had effectively bet against successfully for many years & which every available indicator suggested was no riskier the year it became a losing bet than any of the many years it wasn’t
…it’s easy to assign blame to various parties…the school, the individual teachers, the students…even the exam board…but the reality is that none of those people were in a position independently to know there was a problem until it was too late to avoid it
…since your grades in those exams are a determining factor in university placement & a review/appeal process wasn’t going to be swift enough to be completed until after the universities allocated their available places on the courses those kids were hoping to attend…in some cases they managed to explain things to the university’s satisfaction & they took them essentially on trust…in others they re-sat exams…some set by different exam boards but many the same one that had set the paper they couldn’t answer…& with a couple of exceptions (who frankly hadn’t studied much & had nobody but themselves to blame, harsh as that may sound) they all went to the same courses at the same institutions they would have had they had the questions they were prepared for show up the first time
…all of which to say…whose feet the problem might be laid at for the purposes of blame is often the least important aspect of things for the people directly effected…particularly when actually all parties have in fact done their job but there ends up being a problem anyway
…sacking blitzer from the channel that birthed the 24hr news cycle…for example…is surely a matter of window dressing in terms of addressing the issues you have with the media & how they cover what they cover…let alone how they identify & retain an audience sufficient to keep their revenue stream in a window that keeps the lights on &/or the presses running… especially in a context where that audience is increasingly fragmented in ways compounded by dwindling attention spans & an exponential increase in things purporting to be primary sources of news…most of which are at best secondary & more often tertiary aggregators of things that come from a handful of international wire agencies
…I can’t afford a subscription to the full reuters feed…or AFP…or even AP…but if you can I assure you that there’s coverage of more or less literally everything under the sun…a slice of which shows up in places I do read…like the guardian or the NYT…or even the BBC…which in the not-so-distant past had an army of correspondents in so many places it had no need to resort to someone else’s…sometimes as the sources someone on staff has written up & sometimes as basically a copy/paste job
…there’s never been a time when the world didn’t provide entirely more news on any given day than anyone could keep track of but it used to be that there were some fairly decent gatekeepers trying to cull an appropriate selection of it & curate it for an audience they had a pretty good understanding of…back when TV barely existed…let alone the online landscape…& the term “paper of record” really meant something
…but those days are long gone…& while I’m not trying to make out there aren’t a raft of things various slices of the media could do a better job of than they do I’ve been doing my best to follow your frequent polemics about it all & despite the proliferation of didactic pronouncements about various aspects &/or particular objects of scorn…I’m no closer to understanding what might realistically be done about any of it that might have even a ghost of a chance of satisfying you than I was on day one…& a lot of days it seems like the most effective cure would actually involve a change on the audience side to one with better skills in terms of comprehension &/or techniques by which to parse the surfeit of information available to them about just about anything they’d care to learn about
…at some point the constructive side of that conversation would be a welcome addition to the overwhelming weight of the destructive exercise of finding fault with what at this point does rather appear to be literally any & every aspect of any & all parts of the media landscape
…that being the easy part & all I have to imagine that at least some folks in this vicinity might have reached a point where that supply is in danger of swamping the available demand?
A big reason that Wolf Blitzer has sat in the chair so long is that Jeff Zucker was exec for so long, and Zucker was one of the worst execs in TV history. His tenure running NBC was a disaster, but the difference between NBC and CNN is that NBC’s top exec looked at how Zucker was destroying the network with ideas like turning over the 10-11pm slot every night to Jay Leno, and they canned him. CNN looked at what he did at NBC, and hired him.
And then they kept him until it finally became public that he had horrible conflicts of interest with the woman he saw outside of his marriage. And CNN got exactly the failure you would expect.
Fixing a TV news outlet is hard. But it’s different in a matter of degree from what is involved in fixing a TV entertainment outlet, rather than some kind of different universe.
It’s notable, though, that entertainment TV has seen huge shifts in the period while CNN has completely stagnated. First in the shift to prestige TV, and then in the explosion of streaming. And in order to accommodate those, there have been huge changes behind the scenes in terms of content, formats, strategies, and above all, personnel. CNN has barely budged. What Zucker’s replacement Chris Licht has done is simply tried to cut them down even more to an even more essential version of what they were, and their ratings have gotten even worse.
Journalism hasn’t really reevaluated what it is since the early 1970s, when there was a conscious move away from the establishment-focused model that they realized resulted in their being led around by the nose on Vietnam by people like Robert McNamara. Since then, there’s been a long backsliding back to where they were in the early 1960s, not so much as a matter of strategy as inability to think beyond what the status quo and determined opponents were telling them.
And the net result as they drift more and more into this bloodless center-right stodginess is increasing distrust and dislike from the general public. And like a lot of failing institutions, the reaction is to blame the public.
A big part of what successful entertainment outlets did to increase their hold on their audiences was to improve their products and make them things that people wanted to engage with, talk about, and care about. And to be clear, a lot of outlets tried, and failed. It’s a brutally hard business.
What the news industry did was the complete opposite. Overwhelmingly people disliked what they saw, disagreed with its presentation, and found it too much work to follow.
From time to time the industry was temporarily revived due to incredible content — things like Hurricane Katrina or Covid made people feel like they needed the product. But execs mistook that for approval of how they were operating, and when events settled, interest plunged even lower than it had been before.
Ironically, every time events drive people to consume the news, the more they’re reminded why they hate the people who put it together. And so the spiral continues.
The more they stay the course, the worse it’s going to get.
…given that none of that would seem to stray into that constructive column I alluded to…& indeed reads like maybe you intended it to thread under @clevernamehere2 ‘s comment above rather than as a response to what I said…it feels like a lot of it is somewhat in the asked&answered category…& I’m not sure I’d entirely agree with the other bits…news media & entertainment media…notwithstanding the part where deliberately trying to merge the two in the model of fox news or alex jones is manifestly irresponsible & no small part of why the audience in the US is not only ill-served but actively mislead into the belief that opinion=fact…is in most parts of the world very much an apples to oranges comparison at almost every level
…I know it leaves a lot of people in a lot of places (&/or countries) shaking their heads…not least because the simple truth is that what goes on in the states is realistically more newsworthy in a host of places that aren’t america than the things going on in the rest of the world are generally held to be in the US…which does rather tend to approach “world news” somewhat the same way as it does baseball’s “world series”
…& I definitely understand & sympathize with sometimes needing to scream into the void a little just to vent some frustration…but…if you’re going somewhere with that which might end up with at least a rough sketch of how you imagine a better version would look…I’d kind of like to get to that part sometime…the journey is not the destination & that’s fair enough & doesn’t stop it from being anywhere between useful & vital…but if the destination always seems to be stuck the other side of the horizon it does rather dampen the spirits of a pilgrim such as myself?
TV news doesn’t really go with “facts” these days.
Not looking where you’re going while riding a bike always leads to disaster.
One moment you’re king of the world (or shaman of the world) and then the next you’re road kill.
It took me having to scrub the video back and forth a few times to realize that someone sent their skateboard to topple him.
From the opposite side of the road! Mad skills!
Doing Gawd’s work.
never mind
…words to live by?
It’s weird. Once you post a video, you can’t go back and edit or the video link doesn’t work. Your only option at that point is to abandon your post and do another one and proofread carefully before you hit submit. So I end up sticking nonsense in there because there’s no “delete post” and then the nonsense gets more likes than my actual posts which means you people are definitely trying to tell me something.
No, I’m not going to bother myo with this. The solution is for me to be more careful.
…speaking for myself I’m pretty certain what I’m trying to tell you is that you have my sympathies
…comments that mis-thread themselves or otherwise manage to bork themselves are infuriating at the best of times…& I know it always aggravates me when I only notice a typo after the edit window times out
…if you do happen to want to get one deleted I think at least some of us can do that from the wordpress dashboard side of things but I haven’t had a look lately to see if those are privileges myo’s inclined to trust me with
…but replacing the text with something like [please delete] would probably work?
And give up my likes? That’s crazy talk.
America’s hardest-hitting journalist asks the tough questions at Trump’s indictment.
These fuckers are going to get someone killed!
While most states are trying to ban abortion, we are stockpiling…
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/wa-state-purchases-3-supply-183623323.html
More good under the radar news where big money lost!
https://crooksandliars.com/2023/04/brandon-johnson-former-teacher-will-be
I really need this shirt!
Police sketch of Trump reminds me of the Grinch. Nice work. True to life.
Let’s go Brandon! (but unironically)
Not that any of this is surprising, but an interesting read:
Russian defector sheds light on Putin paranoia and his secret train network
Pence is complying with the court order to testify (with some restrictions) before the special counsel for 1/6:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/05/pence-testimony-jan-6-appeal-00090634
Former national security officials Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli recently told the 1/6 grand jury that they warned Trump he had no authority to seize voting machines.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/05/politics/election-voting-machines-trump-national-security/index.html
Also there was a court order forcing Mark Meadows and possibly former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and several Trump White House advisers such as Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino to testify to the grand jury.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/04/politics/trump-aides-testimony-january-6/index.html
Oh, and Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch must testify at the Dominion trial:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/dominion-demands-rupert-murdoch-testify-live-defamation-trial-rcna78306
All of these people will try to be slippery, but they run a lot of risks if they go too far. Prisoner’s dilemma scenarios really start to kick in as more people and more information gets into the mix.
…the first pair of those I thought weren’t new information this week but maybe I’ve conflated some things…it’s a lot to keep tack of when the same names crop up in so many glacially-slow strands of progress with this stuff…but the third one I thought wasn’t so much a new court order as the same one that had been previously issued being hastily appealed in a last-minute late-night hail mary before his orangeness got arraigned…which appeal got deservedly slapped down with the quickness?
…& as for the dominion stuff…the murdochs being compelled to testify feels like it shouldn’t actually be surprising…or at least that it ought to be more surprising if they somehow managed to avoid it the way they doubtless will strive to avoid actually answering the questions put to them in court
…but the part where a bunch of the things dominion might have had to argue in that court have been awarded summary judgement in their favor…meaning they only really need to persuade jurors to determine that the network knowingly spouted bullshit to their audience with every understanding of the extent to which that was entirely at odds with their remit as a broadcast network purporting to supply news that included actual facts somewhere in the mix & not just a bunch of alex joneses with better offices & competent make up & wardrobe departments
…that part I’m under the impression is better news for dominion’s case than even they might have been expecting?
In further Minnesota news;
https://www.kare11.com/article/money/consumer/cub-union-workers-to-strike-this-weekend/89-3a439a59-f4af-4fa5-b609-4973124e4bb7
It’s
100% *NOT*a complete surprise, that Cub stores are apparently going to close on Easter, now, rather than running with a skeleton crew…😉😈🤣
The union grocery stores here are always closed on Easter. No reason the CUB stores can’t be, too!
i really enjoyed the time i had without fucking trump in my daily newsfeed
i mean..sure there was a pandemic…and a war…..and energy prices went fucking nuts
but i didnt have to listen to his fucking word salad….and that seems like a fair trade
kind of annoyed hes back again
I am literally triggered by his voice. I get a spike in tension and anxiety, I start to feel stress completely disproportionate to the event. He could be talking about something completely unrelated to politics and his goddamn fucking voice still affects me.
So yeah, I have done everything possible since 2016 to not hear his voice and I’m definitely being very, very selective of what news media I watch lately because of it.
his voice is a problem for me to….just kind of…makes me punchy
but pair that with the fact at least half the time hes just mix and matching words……well mostly just mixing…fucker makes no sense most of the time
and his supporters say he tells it as is?
tells what as it is? what the fuck did he even just say?
wheres my giant fucking meteorite!
at least half the population of this planet is too fucking dumb to want to share a planet with
Same! I never have sound on on my phone because of my kids. For the longest time I could still hear his voice when reading CC or quotes. The only time I expose myself to his voice now is when it’s a video edited to mock him like that music video someone posted recently.