Our congress, our president, and the media have followed Trump's lead...

[Gmoney4WW]

There is no dignity in politics anymore. And a lot of that is due to the media. On the record politicians avoided language of a juvenile nature, and media never reported language of a juvenile nature. The media quote congressmen and women as they say things like "Let's get this thing f...ing done." Congressmen sing 'Na na, na nah, hey, hey, goodbye', and the media reports it. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. With Trumps reality TV attitude, the media(liberal and conservative) have followed his lead and taken it full on.

You never would have seen this in Reagan or Bush I's presidency. There were some vestiges of this undignified reporting in Clinton and Bush II's presidency, but it was not full on yet. Whether you agree with him or not, the media did not do this in Obama's presidency, and neither did Obama. There is no sense of respect from all sides at this point. It disappoints me that we have gone this way. I hope it gets pulled back with our next president, but I fear that once the media goes that way, it becomes the norm.

Note: I should have said 'presidency' not 'president' in the title of this thread, but I hit return right before I realized this.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

Side note, I haven't seen the Supreme Court or the media's reporting on the Supreme Court go this way yet. One last shred of dignity saved for the moment.

 

[lawpoke87]

Oh....don't kid yourself. This has been going on a very long time.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/14/dnc-chair-frontrunner-once-compared-george-bush-to-hitler/

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/04/29/politicians.swear.list/

 

[URedskin54]

Side note, I haven't seen the Supreme Court or the media's reporting on the Supreme Court go this way yet. One last shred of dignity saved for the moment.

Check some of the things that get said about Clarence Thomas.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

Oh....don't kid yourself. This has been going on a very long time.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/14/dnc-chair-frontrunner-once-compared-george-bush-to-hitler/

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/04/29/politicians.swear.list/

As a whole, I disagree. Showing a few instances of anecdotal evidence in an article published in 2011 doesn't convince me. And note that all of it was 2007 and after.(aside from two exceptions in the 60's) I am not saying that it didn't exist, I'm saying the instances of it were few and far between and it did not come close to dominating the publicity. Also I did say that there were some beginning vestiges of it beginning with Clinton's presidency.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

Check some of the things that get said about Clarence Thomas.

I had forgotten about the Thomas nomination process and it's continuation. Thanks for pointing that out. It has still stayed out of the general & ongoing publicity towards the Supreme Court though.

 

[lawpoke87]

As a whole, I disagree. Showing a few instances of anecdotal evidence in an article published in 2011 doesn't convince me. And note that all of it was 2007 and after.(aside from two exceptions in the 60's) I am not saying that it didn't exist, I'm saying the instances of it were few and far between and it did not come close to dominating the publicity. Also I did say that there were some beginning vestiges of it beginning with Clinton's presidency.

I do agree that the tone and word choices have gone downhill as partisanship has increased. Common respect and courtesy seem to be gone from politics. Can you imagine a President of one party meeting with the Speaker of the House of the opposing party once a week over drinks and cigars to iron out compromises like Reagan and Tip O'Neil?

 

[TU_BLA]

Check some of the things that get said about Clarence Thomas.

But Clarence Thomas did that to himself. His history of sexual harassment, his history of virtually never writing his own opinion on rulings (either dissenting or concurring) and instead signing on with whatever Scalia said (a crutch he can no longer use). After the Anita Hill thing and still managing to get confirmed, maybe he just decided to lay low. I did see Anita Hill still speaks out about her experience and sexual harassment in the workplace.

 

[URedskin54]

But Clarence Thomas did that to himself. His history of sexual harassment, his history of virtually never writing his own opinion on rulings (either dissenting or concurring) and instead signing on with whatever Scalia said (a crutch he can no longer use). After the Anita Hill thing and still managing to get confirmed, maybe he just decided to lay low. I did see Anita Hill still speaks out about her experience and sexual harassment in the workplace.

The amount of vile racism I've read about Clarence Thomas is disgusting. There is no defense. You're wasting your time with whatever kind of excuse this is. Thomas fwiw, has written some of my favorite opinions. Whether or not they are merely dissenting or concurrences is no matter to me. They often show a separate and distinct personal philosophy that I like, and they also tend to enrage liberals who have a habit of not understanding what he wrote.

 

[TUMe]

Back to tone and language, the change in political discourse, resembles the trend in our society. While our leaders don't set a good example in this respect, most do not set a good example in much of anything.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

Back to tone and language, the change in political discourse, resembles the trend in our society. While our leaders don't set a good example in this respect, most do not set a good example in much of anything.

The media used to hold standards. Because our society is going this way is no excuse for them to let those standards go. In fact it is a good reason for them to hold onto those standards even harder. Same goes for the politicians.

What standards the media did still hold were thrown out during Trumps campaign. The media came down to Trumps muck raking level. At this point it's like monkeys throwing feces at the zoo.(applies equally to all sides of the media, and to both parties) It was a slippery slope of shinola that put them all at the bottom together.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

This post makes me back go to that old chestnut from 2012.

How it should be, and how it really used to be.

I long for the day when a couple of juggernauts in the media make their best effort to hold those standards higher, and make it known that that's what they are attempting to do. I don't care whether they are liberal or conservative, as long as they make a distinct effort to hold themselves to this. Hopefully they will be from both parties, if they ever do exist.

 

[ctt8410]

This is a quality Crossfire post. I've been on the same wavelength lately and the recent blog entry from Scott Alexander really crystallized my feelings on the subject:

"If some weird conservative echo chamber is biased, well, what did you expect? If a neutral gatekeeper institution is biased, now we have a problem."

 

[Gmoney4WW]

This is a quality Crossfire post. I've been on the same wavelength lately and the recent blog entry from Scott Alexander really crystallized my feelings on the subject:

"If some weird conservative echo chamber is biased, well, what did you expect? If a neutral gatekeeper institution is biased, now we have a problem."

There are some issues I need to ponder a bit longer, to discern whether I disagree on certain points, or have a caveat, or agree with a stipulation. But the parts I pretty much agree with come in one long quote, and two short quotes.

Q1
"FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.

They also ensured that the process would feed on itself. As conservatives left for their ghettos, the neutral gatekeeper institutions leaned further and further left, causing more and more conservatives to leave. Meanwhile, the increasingly obvious horribleness of the conservative ghettos made liberals feel more and more justified in their decision to be biased against conservatives. They intensified their loathing and contempt, accelerating the conservative exodus.

The equilibrium is basically what we see now. The neutral gatekeeper institutions lean very liberal, though with a minority of conservative elites who are good at keeping their heads down and too mainstream/prestigious to settle for anything less. The ghettos contain a combination of seven zillion witches and a few decent conservatives who are increasingly uncomfortable but know there’s no place for them in the mainstream."

A nice summary of the situation. /\
----------------------------------------------------

Q2
"Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well."

This just seems like common sense. With a liberal bias towards most news organizations because of the liberal bias in the institutions from which they come(Arts & Sciences) If you are not conservative then the left bias if it is not great, will almost always increase over time, especially if individual journalists allow themselves to be irritated subconsciously into a harder drift left by the extremist right.

The only way this can be avoided for any period is to have a strong individual leader who is very self aware, perceives minor changes in the organization, and knows how to push back. And this ability to push back often needs to be subliminal, and that is a talent that is hard to find.
---------------------------------

Q3
"Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging."

I think we must wait for Donald Trump to be forced out of the hole and shoved under a rock. Meaning impeachment, lost election, or term limit. It's hard to know where we are going to go until we see who the Republicans are going to support in the general election other than Trump. It's kind of difficult to stop the hole from getting any deeper when the guy next to you is still digging.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

This is a quality Crossfire post. I've been on the same wavelength lately and the recent blog entry from Scott Alexander really crystallized my feelings on the subject:

"If some weird conservative echo chamber is biased, well, what did you expect? If a neutral gatekeeper institution is biased, now we have a problem."

By the way, I don't consider Vox/Slate to be a little liberal, which I felt was your implication. ;0)

But considering the subject of the article and how it was done, I could accept the liberal bias was ok as far as what they were referring to.

 

[rabidTU]

Check some of the things that get said about Clarence Thomas.

Bingo! The media and democrat party "lynched" an "uppity" black man who was to become a SCOTUS justice and did it on primetime national TV. That shows "who they ( and the media) were" and still ARE. That Colbert "lop eared creep" is an example.

 

[lawpoke87]

Colbert recently said things on a major network about the POTUS which I never dreamed would be tolerated. CBS barely blinked. Truly a sad commentary and the standards and political leaning of the media.

 

[rabidTU]

Colbert recently said things on a major network about the POTUS which I never dreamed would be tolerated. CBS barely blinked. Truly a sad commentary and the standards and political leaning of the media.

A class act like the late Johnny Carson must be turning over in his grave. The comparison of those two programs shows how low the late night programming has become. I heard the FCC is investigating the Colbert show now. CBS needs to reevaluate that "so called" show. Hope most of the kids weren't watching. A disgrace.

 

[URedskin54]

The FCC investigates all complaints I think and I'd imagine nothing will come of it. I don't mind anybody saying stuff like that about a president. I've never bought into the whole "respect the office" thing. They aren't kings and most people aren't in the military. They should be criticized and made fun of....a lot. It just seemed a little obscene for network TV for me.

 

[Gmoney4WW]

Respect is a two way street, Trump hasn't commanded it, or given any in how he treats the media. Just because you treat the media with respect, doesn't mean you will be seen as agreeing with or acquiescing to them.

I'm not sure Trump knows how to give anybody respect though. He is way too to narcissistic to know how to show anybody respect. You have to turn from the mirror for a minute, to give anyone respect. Even the respect he gives is usually faux respect.(Abbas, Netanyahu, May, Merkel, Trudeau, Nieto, Abe, Pope Francis, Jinping) And they have figured out that turning that faux respect back towards Trump is the only way to deal with him. Lots of bulls..t in the house.

The only one leader I've seen him show true respect was Putin, which is ridiculous. It shows you the kind of power he wishes to have and never will.

It's too bad Chavez and Fidel died so soon, otherwise I'm sure he would have shown them real respect.

... and yeah on the fcc investigating. They investigate any complaints, it doesn't separate the act as being over or under the line.