It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk He’s telling us what he will do to his political enemies if he’s president again. Is anyone listening?
I feel pretty safe in saying that we can now stop giving him the benefit of that particular doubt. His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.
I saw the Guardian report that “Biden campaign accuses Trump of parroting Hitler”
How about, Trump parrots Hitler? Why this Biden campaign accuses Trump of.
the media are a bunch of pussies hedging their bets with the audience, also willing to skew anything to cause controversy as long as it doesn’t come back to bite them. Sensationalism sells.
Likely liability… Saying “X” puts you in the way of more lawsuits than “so-and-so says ‘X’”
You’re possibly correct, though my understanding is journalism gets enough freedom for it to be OK, but that potentially has to be resolved in court which takes money. They’d rather not be totally honest than lose a little profit.
That title is totally honest though? They are reporting the fact that the Biden campaign said X. Deciding whether or not that is an accurate portrayal of Trump is a matter for opinion and analysis section not news.
Also the Guardian is a UK publication, defamation is slightly easier to win in the UK, thus more likely to be costly for the defendant. Truth is not an absolute defense like it is in the US.
As described in The Newsroom, a great show I personally love, the media is “biased toward fairness.”
This is most likely due to the need to be as profitable as possible, although now that business model is changing in the Trump/Fox/MSNBC-Hyper-Partisan era and we are seeing more catered viewpoints. But the “bias toward fairness” is what has helped shift the Overton window so far to the right. They ignore basic factual truth to appear “fair,” taking this floating viewpoint that insists on looking at everything through the amorphous, yet binary, political lens.
The example used in the show was about flat earthers (this was, actually, a time when that was an absolutely absurd example): “if half of the Republican caucus walked onto the house floor tomorrow and said ‘the earth is flat,’ The Times would lead with ‘Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on shape of earth.’”
It’s one of the many, many, many, many issues with modern society that stack up to give us the overarching problem…of everything going on today. I dunno, maybe this is just me, but any time I think about any nuanced, hyper-specific issue like this, with such far-reaching consequences, our problems seem insurmountable. Because this issue is connected to larger issues and much smaller issues and THE largest issue and the consequences are devastating…it just seems like modern society has become so stacked and complicated that you can’t unravel one problem without digging up and figuring out a million others. And we’re running out of time. But even saying THAT is a multifaceted conversation…it’s all so exhausting.