“There is no Pravda in Izvestiya”: the left probably thought that controlling the media was a victory
The left has been in near-total control of the MSM for quite some time now. No doubt they thought that was a victory, and it certainly has given them some victories that I don’t think would have otherwise occurred if there had been an equal number of voices on the right in the MSM.
But the media can get control of the entire shebang, and if it isn’t competent at its propaganda—if it doesn’t pick and choose but is too flagrant in its willingness to lie for the good of the Party, if its lies are too easy to see as lies—then the entire enterprise can actually sabotage the Cause and result in the public’s distrusting it.
And then the public’s perception of the media can turn into something resembling the general perception of Pravda, widely considered by the Soviet public during the days of the USSR as being a ludicrous and mendacious government mouthpiece:
The miserable former citizens of the old Soviet Union had an expression – “There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda” – which, roughly translated, reads “There is no Truth in News and there is no News in Truth.” Pravda was the news organization of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Izvestiya was the news organization of the Soviet government. Pravda is “Truth” in Russian and Izvestiya is “News.”
Of course, during the days when the Soviets had an especially ruthless and iron grip, it almost didn’t matter what the people thought. In a way, the more ludicrous Pravda was, the more it showed the people how little power they had to change anything, and represented their leaders’ laughing in their faces.
But—at least so far—Americans still retain relative amount of liberty. That may not last, but at present it could make a big big difference.
Years ago we thought that maybe the blogosphere would make a big enough difference, too. I think it has helped, but not nearly enough. And Twitter and Facebook have been dominated by the left, which has the goal of censoring the right, and they have also facilitated the leftist desire to organize mobs of SJWs to attack those people simpatico to them who are just not extreme enough to suit their fancy.
What’s happened to social media in the political sense is an example of Robert Conquest’s second law in action:
Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
And what’s happening to the press right now can be seen as an example of his third law:
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
[ADDENDUM: I just saw this piece by Lee Smith in Tablet, entitled “System Fail: The Mueller Report is an unmitigated disaster for the American press and the ‘expert’ class that it promotes.” Here’s an excerpt:
The media criticism of the media’s performance covering Russiagate is misleadingly anodyne—OK, sure the press did a bad job, but to be fair there really was a lot of suspicious stuff going on and now let’s all get back to doing our important work. But two years of false and misleading Russiagate coverage was not a mistake, or a symptom of lax fact-checking.
Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him. None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation.
The campaign was waged not in hidden corners of the internet, but rather by the country’s most prestigious news organizations—including, but not only, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. The farce that has passed for public discourse the last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law. And yet, they all appeared to be credible because the institutions sustaining them are credible.
My impulse is to say “you mean were credible.” And yet that would be a cheap shot by me. I personally know many many many intelligent people who still (at least until this moment) read one or both of those papers and/or watch one or both of those networks every day or close to it, and believe what they say (and will not under any circumstances watch or read sources on the right, ever). You might say that those people have closed minds. But they would say that they don’t want to waste time filling their heads with lies. Which of course is ironic, but the dilemma is that if a person doesn’t read the other side, the leftist mouthpieces can retain quite a bit of their luster.
Which probably is one of many reasons why the MSM cannot admit the magnitude of what it did with Russiagate. Its only hope is to spin, spin, spin and to hope its readers buy its spin on what happened, rather than blame the press.
But I’m wondering if the MSM’s Russiagate hype represents a bridge too far, even for loyal readers of the MSM. Smith certainly seems to think so, because he also writes that for the MSM, “Russiagate is an extinction level event.” Time will tell, I suppose.]
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Of course, the moment Trump was elected, all the “beautiful people” rushed out, panic-stricken, to buy “1984”….
(Not sure that even Orwell himself could have imagined that….)
I doubt very much (although I have no personal experience of it) whether the news on state-funded RT is, on average, more mendacious and more thoroughly misleading than what is offered to the (often gullible) American public every single day on CNN and MSNBC.
Very unfair to compare American media to Pravda and Izvestia. Unfair to Pravda and Izvestia that is. They at least had the excuse they were under duress.
Sing it sister. There is no truth in Pravda. No news in Investia..
I saw a bit from Tucker Carlson (posted maybe at Hot Air or PLB), in which he talked about the MSM shifting from Trump collusion to health care immediately after Nancy Pelosi said that is what the Dems should start talking about. CNN and MSNBC are the press offices of the DNC.
I don’t recall having said this here, but I have elsewhere: The media are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party.
I have long said that it is much worse with our MSM, as people knew there was no truth in Pravda. That might be changing, however, seeing as the political positions of the average Leftist comprise their religion, like zealots, they won’t be changed. They would have to be willing to seek truth, not just accept it at face value like the dogmas of faith.
No, it’s not a bridge too far. Nothing would be going too far.
The Left’s projecting “eliminationist impulses” (defined downward as a mere disinterest in participating in the pet projects, rituals, and burdensome costs associated with left-progressive ‘creative’ dysfunction) onto their opponents, tells you just how their own psyches are constituted.
They recognize no moral limits or boundaries to their wants, nor any point where they should pause, sated, in their human re-engineering program.
You further make the generous mistake of presuming that the persons with whom you are acquainted have any interest in, or commitment to, an “abstract” or “principled” interest in The Truth; or that they even allow as how there is such a thing.
I know you love them; and they are people who continue to treat you well. But if you cannot talk honestly and openly to them, where do you think you might find yourself if they imagined you constituted any impediment or embarrassment?
“I know you love them; and they are people who continue to treat you well. But if you cannot talk honestly and openly to them, where do you think you might find yourself if they imagined you constituted any impediment or embarrassment?” DNW
This is an interesting question to ponder with regard to family/friendship relationships. Continuing to be treated well is important…very important but not being able to talk honestly and openly. That does seem more the arena of professional relationships, not intimate ones.
Even if one were a completely demented Trump-hater, and could also somehow accept the whole ludicrous spy-novel-plot collusion story, how could anyone fail to notice that Trump’s foreign policy towards Russia was substantially more adversarial than his predecessor’s? If anything, Trump is excessively *hostile* towards Russia. What kind of an asset is *that*? If he had been a Russian agent, he wasn’t panning out too well. For example, where did Trump get the idea to pressure Angela Merkel to stop purchasing natural gas from Gazprom? Was that on the microfilm from Boris and Natasha? Or did Trump just misinterpret “Must keel moose and squirrel”? That’s about the level of critical thinking we’re talking about here. There just HAD to be lots of people in the media pushing this story who actually understood that it was absurd right from the beginning.
This “witch hunt,” thoroughly promoted by the MSM, has done immense collateral damage to many innocent citizens, the country, and our foreign policy.
Many innocent citizens have been pauperized , their reputations sullied, and ability to earn a living stunted. Some have been victimized by process crimes. Others, Manafort, Cohen, and Stone have been tired for crimes that have nothing to do with the Trump campaign.
Public opinion has been purposely directed toward opposition to Trump and we deplorables. The country, divided as it is, is extremely vulnerable to sabotage and subversion by foreign actors.
Trump’s attempts to renegotiate trade deals with China, Japan, and Europe have been stymied as the foreign powers waited to see if Trump would be removed from office or at least crippled by his own government. The same seems true of the North Korea negotiations. Kim seems to have been stalling in hopes that Trump would fall or be neutered.
Surprise. Now that the Mueller report summary shows Trump will not be indicted, the trade negotiations with China have suddenly begun to bear some fruit.
The subversive activities of the progressives and the MSM have been the work of saboteurs not patriots. And that is the Pravda, but not Izvestia to we deplorables.
Neo quotes a Canadian source:
For what it’s worth, I recall the saying as “There is no news in Izvestiya (news), and no truth in Pravda (truth).” Wiki concurs.Pravda.
Wiki quotes a NYT article.
My bet is that Soviet citizens said both versions.
Lee Smith’s article is a great companion piece to Matt Taibbi’s – kind of like right & left bookends.
However, I’m in the pessimistic camp that says none of this will make great inroads on the American left (as Neo warned), and so they will remain ignorant of why Donald Trump is President, through the next election and likely forever.
Not an extinction event for the MSM as a whole, but their insane partisanship has been a tipping point for individuals, such as Brandon Straka & others at #WalkAway.
If you somehow missed Taibbi’s rant against his leftist journolist colleagues:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
Gringo – thanks for the extra information, both News & Truth.
FWIW, the Canada Free Press has a lot of interesting stories up on its site.
Slightly tangential, but I noticed this interesting observation in the final paragraph and thought it rather curious.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/28/nellie-ohr-favored-hillary-clinton/
“Nellie Ohr testified that while her research for Fusion did not appear to have made its way into the dossier, she recognized some of her work in the media.”
This post from CFP on Smollett is almost an example of the Pravda/Izvestia character of the MSM.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/lie-king-jussie-smollett-major-distraction-for-mueller-investigation-releas
Even Pravda & Izvestiya have to have sources.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/03/11/trump-russia_20_dossier-tied_firm_sending_dc_journalists_daily_collusion_briefings.html
CFP is probably viewed by some as loony right wing conspiracy theorists, but they make a couple of interesting observations that might be worth pursuing.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/were-hillary-clinton-surrogates-behind-cnns-deceitful-ireport-posts
Another interesting compilation of the history of the attempted coup is
https://www.theepochtimes.com/spygate-the-inside-story-behind-the-alleged-plot-to-take-down-trump_2833074.html
and it has a great graphic of the shameful folk of DOJ and FBI who have resigned or been demoted
https://services.epoch.cloud/public-labs/files/doj-fbi-infographic.jpg
I look forward to criminal prosecution of those who deserve it.
They cost innocent people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, making them targets of the violent left, and depriving them of the ability to earn a living.
“…the more ludicrous Pravda was, the more it showed the people how little power they had to change anything, and represented their leaders’ laughing in their faces.” That’s exactly what’s going on here. The reason we’re being told that big hairy burly men can identify as women and must be allowed to shower and change clothes with girls has nothing to do with concern for trans “rights”. What it’s really about is the lefties showing the normals who’s the boss. It’s about using the power of the state as a weapon against people who do not wish to submit to state control. The purpose of the ruling class’s lies is not to deceive, but to humiliate.
NJMike,
It has never made sense that Putin preferred Trump over hrc. Trump was pro oil and gas extraction. He was pro missle defense. Not exactly positions that sit well with the Russians. But hrc? Well there is Uranium One and Slicks half a million for a 20 minute speech in Moscow. It is absurd to believe Trump was the favorite candidate of the Russian Oligarchs.
It does seem to have proven objectively to be ‘a bridge too far’, alright. Like the electoral college and 3/4 vote for Amendments … Hubris is the little guys’ friend.
But worse (for them), the Collusion project also bears similarities to Operation Barbarossa, the catastrophically failed German invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941 WWII.
Whether the readership now abandons the Media for their perfidy remains to be seen. But there is little question that the failure of Collusion leaves its coalition of interests strung-out along an 1,800 mile exposed supply-line. And it leaves Trump with vast fuel reserves for his bombers & tanks, even stove-oil for all the enlisted troops’ tents … and ammo & munitions piled high.
Winter is coming, and the failure of Collusion leaves the Media & accomplices … unprepared.
Blogs have sort of fulfilled the function of “Samizdat” in the old USSR. Not Facebook or Google but blogs like this one and Instapundit. Remember Rather’s attempt to take down Bush was revealed by a blogger. Also, amnestying example of the Intelligence Community trying to alter policy was the “alternate” report from CIA that contradicted Bush and Cheney.
Right now, I’m reading “Beirut Rules, which describes how clueless the CIA was in 1982-83.
parker on March 28, 2019 at 9:45 pm at 9:45 pm said:
NJMike,
It has never made sense that Putin preferred Trump over hrc. Trump was pro oil and gas extraction. He was pro missle defense. Not exactly positions that sit well with the Russians. But hrc? Well there is Uranium One and Slicks half a million for a 20 minute speech in Moscow. It is absurd to believe Trump was the favorite candidate of the Russian Oligarchs.
* * *
Hmmm.
Did the Clinton Machine make a deal with some variety of Russian elitehood to have them make (frankly) bumbling “attempts to support Trump” which were never expected to move the needle in his favor, but to insulate her activities: “I can’t possibly be favoring Russian interests, look at all the things they did to help my opponent!”
AesopFan,
The Clintons are grifters, practiced liars, schemers, vile, and would sell themselves to the highest bidder for their personal power and cold hard cash. Enough to make me pity clueless Chelsea.
mikesixes:
It isn’t enough to agree that 2+2=5
You have to believe that 2+2=5
Or the rats will eat your face
Edward – thanks for the links to Epoch Times’ very comprehensive and detailed report on what looks to be the entire history of the attempt to frame our President for treason.
I’m with Sarah Sanders on that one.
Neo,
You say, “Years ago we thought that maybe the blogosphere would make a big enough difference, too. I think it has helped, but not nearly enough.”
I’m not so sure about that. To get an accurate read on that, you have to distinguish between the above-60 crowd (one group), the 40-60 crowd (another group), and the 15-40 crowd (a third group).
Most of the news-interested people I know are in the 15-40 crowd. And most of them have not watched any portion of a television news program (or read a mainstream newspaper) more than 6-8 times in their entire lives.
Most of the rest of the news-interested people I know are in the 40-60 crowd. They used to watch television news, but stopped about a decade ago.
Only the few news-interested people I know who are above 60 still have television news channels as part of their channel-switching muscle memory.
All the folks I’m describing are news-interested people. But that’s why they don’t go to the television or to the newspapers or news magazines any longer. They’ve evolved over time to be resistant to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. They know that general news sources contain no news. They’re hungry for actual news, and they don’t want to starve watching CNN or Fox. So they go where the news is.
They go to YouTube opinion shows, Instapundit and Fark and Drudge and Life Site News and other similar news-aggregators, and they go to topically-trustworthy blogs.
There’s only one thing you can learn from the legacy media, and that’s the answer to the question, “how bat-guano nuts are washed up legacy-media D-grade celebrities these days?”
Part of the problem is that nobody has time for legacy media. We’re too busy. If there’s information we need to process, we want to process it 5 minutes before we need to use it, and then forget about it once we’re done putting it to work. And television news is broadcast whenever they broadcast it. Nobody has time to wait until they “get to the segment” that’s of interest.
In short: If you can’t get it via a click or a tap, it doesn’t count any longer as a “major news outlet.”
That’s right. You heard me. The Washington Post is not a major news outlet. (The Young Turks has a bigger audience.) The L.A. Times is not a major news outlet. (Breitbart has wider circulation.) The opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal don’t count as a significant player in conservative media. (Ben Shapiro has a hundred times their audience.)
And it’s also a matter of Topic Specificity. For anyone under 40, it doesn’t matter much if someone makes a claim about environmental policy in the New York Times. It matters if Judith Curry says something about it on her blog. That’s where people who care about environment-science news get their environment-science news. And anyone who doesn’t get it there, probably doesn’t care enough about the topic for any of their behaviors to be influenced by any information they might receive.
Now, you might say I’m overstating it. And let me admit: There is one way in which those legacy outlets matter.
They matter for persons who don’t care about news, who are trying not to listen to whatever some CNN host is nattering on about in the airport as they wait for a flight. Because every now and then they’ll subconsciously record something that’s said by the host. They’ll notice-without-noticing something that’s written in a headline above-the-fold on a newspaper left behind at a coffee-shop. They’ll never ever listen to the details of the report or read the article. But just the headlines and the casual phrases of the anchor-babe may influence their assumptions later on.
That matters a bit.
But not half as much — not a tenth as much — as the leftist slant-on-history taught in America’s primary schools matters. That’s where “worldview formation” actually happens. Nobody takes mainstream general-purpose “news outlets” seriously for “worldview formation” any more. It’s too much effort — buying a newspaper, changing the channel on the television, waiting through the commercial in hopes that something interesting may be said after-the-break.
So television news personalities are the galley-slaves in a half-sunk vessel still madly rowing, not realizing all the passengers under 60 have disembarked.
You also add, “And Twitter and Facebook have been dominated by the left, which has the goal of censoring the right, and they have also facilitated the leftist desire to organize mobs of SJWs to attack those people simpatico to them who are just not extreme enough to suit their fancy.”
Ah, now you’re on to something.
Facebook and Twitter. Now they DO matter.
But I think they matter in a very different way.
First, keep in mind that the younger the demographic, the more they’re fleeing from Facebook and not-growing at Twitter. Instagram is where it’s at. And Instagram isn’t really suited for commentary about news stories. The young don’t care about that, so Instagram is the more logical platform for them.
And Twitter doesn’t allow long-form thought easily to be expressed. Facebook’s a bit easier, but has a different drawback: You implicitly feel that your Facebook friends are a “social circle.” (They’re called “friends.”) So you’ll often curb your political thoughts a tad, in order to not alienate those friends. Unless it’s your schtick — what you’re selling — people often resent you for it. Friends can drift apart when their only interactions with George always circle around George waving his smelly political opinions in everyone’s face.
I think Facebook’s and Twitter’s censorious policies matter for precisely one reason: They help stave-off an anti-leftist preference cascade.
The more a person with one conservative thought feels lonely and isolated in thinking it, the more afraid they are to speak it out loud.
Thus Facebook and Twitter do what dictators like Saddam Hussein used to do more forcibly: Make everyone too afraid to speak up. When everyone who hates the dictator (or who thinks the left is stupid and crazy) carefully keeps their mouth shut, each person thinks to himself “I’m the only one, and I’ll get slaughtered if I speak up.”
If everyone who hated the dictator were to suddenly and simultaneously say, “Hey! I hate the dictator!” they’d look around at half or more of their neighbors, smile shyly, and say, “What? You too?!” Then they would experience unity, and camaraderie, and become bold.
Facebook and Twitter don’t effectively spread perspectives on current events. Late night talk show hosts achieve that more effectively. But Facebook and Twitter amplify the ease with which some groups “find one another,” while intentionally dampening the assembling of other potential groups, so that the individuals within them all feel alone.
That’s their power.
R.C., a most interesting post.
Lee Smith, in an article from almost a year ago, describes how FB policies have hurt greatly the media’s profitibility and decision-making ability:
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/238195/zuckerberg-public-enemy-no-1
On Law #3, I don’t believe it’s a cabal of its enemies.
Instead, look at the Iron Laws of Oligarchy and Bureaucracy:
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an “iron law” within any democratic organization as part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization.
Which was clearly expanded upon by (SF author) Jerry:
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Most of the good people who get “left behind” in an org fail to advance because they’re working too much on the mission of the org, rather than advancing their part of the org. Their own power inside the org.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Note that power-hungry folk, in any org, gravitate towards getting power in that org. The Left is always more attractive to power-hungry folk, those who want power over the people they work with or live with.
The Left is all about being in the elite, and ruling from that elite status – the second group in every org.
The MSM won’t change. They are literally delusional. There is no introspection or critical thinking. How many times could a rational journalist have looked at this and asked: “does this make any sense?”
Note that power-hungry folk, in any org, gravitate towards getting power in that org. The Left is always more attractive to power-hungry folk, those who want power over the people they work with or live with.
This is why I quit the AMA years ago. I was elected an alternate delegate from California to the convention. I attended the June convention, which is about Science. and was really interesting. Then came the December convention, which is about elections to the Board of Trustees. It was like a political convention. Since I was a junior delegate, I was assigned to monitor a committee. I choose the Financial committee. It was an eye opener. I learned what AMA Trustees are paid. There list was down by about half before we got to $500,000 per year.
No wonder they campaigned so hard for office. Some of the same was true of the California Medical Association. The CMA salaries were not that high but the senior people in the CMA got positions on the Board of Blue Shield, the insurance company owned by CMA. Most of the people who campaigned for these positions were looking for a way to get out of medical practice.
This post is a very good bookend to the current chapter of the GetTrump scandal, and it has elicited excellent commentary. Thanks
And to mikesixes on March 28, 2019 at 9:35 pm at 9:35 pm — I think you’re right. Is there a way for us to be increasingly “reactless” as the MSM tries to push our buttons every hour of every day? Even if every live human said “Meh” to their reports, astroturf bots would be giving an illusion of interest and substance. My hope is that internet advertisers get better and better at quantifying and deducting bot hits. But the problem is that live bodies feel compelled to weigh in on every emerging wave, whether it’s bot driven or not.
R.C. at 1:08am makes some great points about blogging, it’s place in the media ecosystem, and the dynamics of contemporary audience-sectors.
How to run a basically one-person outlet, covering a broad range of whatever-topics, has long been a key interest of mine. That’s why I’m here at New Neo: that’s what she is trying to do, too.
Judith Curry, otoh, keeps a tight topical focus. Not that there aren’t other important things going on with her … because in fact there are. And some of them are also of high interest – and relevance – to others. She bailed on a tenured Professorship. And it’s because of the pressure she received as a free-thinker, in the Climate field.
The mixed-bag of materials on New Neo is cool, but it’s not cost or issue-free. Categories can help, and Neo is aware of this tool, has made a good stab at it. Of course, to really address the multi-topical matter, Categories have to be at the Top of the page: First thing the visitor does, is pick which category to peruse. Then come back and pick another, and so on.
Categorization quickly becomes demanding. Combinatorially explosive. “Election 2016” shows 530 entries. “Liberals and Conservatives”, 692. “Terrorism and Terrorists”, 652. “Uncategorized”, 2,036. These all need to be sub-divided into ‘sensible’ sub-sets.
We need to sub-categorize, and then navigate within a structured presentation of them, which is hopefully reasonably-intuitive. It is an important strength & asset of a one-person website, that all of this classification takes place within a single mind, and thus consistently reflects a single perspective/perception. Otoh, it’s a weakness & downer, that said person faces a lot of added work.
‘Commercial’ blogs have tried to get different writers to ‘document’ their own work in this way; tags & categories, mainly. This generally leads to quite a mess, and it generates a lot of grumbling in the organization. You can’t really ‘order’ people to do this kind of stuff. “If I wanted to be someone’s Librarian-slave, I wouldn’t be a writer!” [Academic document Meta Data, otoh, makes the challenge of sole-webmaster content-structuring seem like kissing yer favorite person! Omg…]
Importantly, similar value-added work has been imposed on those who Comment. Comments & Commenting (2 different things) are very big, for independent and for multi-topical blog-authors. Yet they are also the source of much trouble, complications, and again outright work that struggles to gain sufficient priority.
We need a Comment breakthrough. Even more than Posts themselves, comments scroll off the screen into a Black Hole, whence they rarely reemerge. Yet comments can make the difference, on Google Rankings.
WordPress is the right place to be pursuing what I discuss in this comment, and it is the default source & environment from which we are most likely to see the holy grail breakthroughs for both content/archive structuring/access, and an enlightened commenting facility.
I’ve maintained a blog for ten years here, but it is mainly to save stuff I want to keep. I have gone back to look at some of what I thought years ago. Here for example is what I thought of Obama in 2008.
I also use it for composing posts at Chicagoboyz.
R.C.: there’s one element you left out. While they may also get news from blogs, You Tube, etc., the 15-40 cohort also get “news” from the late night “comedy” shows, which have become insufferable propaganda/hate mills. Earlier on, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher seemed to do a better job of balancing the humor and the indoctrination. Heck, when Colbert first branched off with his own show, he at least exposed people to conservative ideas, albeit in a snarky, ironic manner. But now, they just feed one-sided vitriol. And even if folks don’t have the attention span to sit through an entire show, the clips get repeated on a variety of formats.
Trump has been great at messaging and packaging ideas. He uses the salesman’s approach of wearing you down with repetition. Thankfully, he seems to have inspired a number of Republicans to do the same (witness Mike Lee’s hilarious Reagan on a Dinosaur bit, which also appropriated just the right touch of Alinskyite ridicule). The Blexit and Walkaway folks are doing similar things in their lanes. The question is are we too late to reach generations who have lost the ability and inclination to use their reasoning abilities and reconsider past positions.
The media can’t go on the air and say “Nothing interesting happened today”, because if they don’t have something to talk about then they don’t have a job.
They have to talk about something; and what they choose to talk about doesn’t have to be true, it just has to attract an audience, Donald Trump understands this very well, and he’s very good at getting them to talk about HIM. This is not to say that the MSM isn’t partisan; but it is a partial explanation for the media fascination with Russiagate – the absence of actual fact was actually a plus from their point of view, because it gave a lot of room for speculation and therefore for more talking.
Mike K at 12:17pm links to his own WordPress-based blog. This is a good example-site, illustrating several worth-noting specifics.
Mike is using what looks like an old theme. It’s possible to have an up-to-date theme, which only ‘looks’ like the old ones, but usually, it’s an old one. They’re better. Ask Mike how much pawing he’s done through more-recent theme-offerings, and how it went for him.
(Neo is using the Weaver theme, the author of which is a bit of an off-beat actor on the WordPress stage. Weaver themes dodge some of the current undesirable trends in WP themes … but they have their limitations, too. WordPress made a hard swerve toward being more Mobile-friendly, but like a lot of web-ware, they took it too far, and made the platform less-adapted to the traditional Desktop Environment. Which probably was more of a Feature, than a Bug…)
Mike, like Neo, puts A LOT of stuff on the front page. As along as you just go to the front page, and scroll down until yer lookin’ at stuff you’ve seen before, this isn’t too bad. Finding something down-in the page, is a little labor-intensive. And if you live in God’s Country (and she periodically threatens to evict you and move back in herself), and your connection is basically Smoke Signals, then this gets to be a little awkward. OTOH, you’ve lived in Gods Country for a long time (and nobody short of God is gonna make you leave!), and have already adapted. (Ie, one turns off images to load Mike’s homepage, then turn images back on, to visit the many pages indexed thereon, one at a time. (I like Mike’s technique of posting an image with each of the (or many) articles on the homepage. I do this too, but with thumbnails, and an ‘exerpt’, which I not only hand-pick, but hand-craft to become an excerpt, ab initio. And only 10 posts.)
I have a WordPress site, and have ‘rolled around’ with the software since it’s early days. I also took & take glances at Drupal, and scan-around for other possible solutions. But like the Lady sings, “Nobody does it better, though sometime I wish someone would”. WordPress has become the global Hegemon (1/3rd of all websites are running on it) … and it has a stupendous Plugin repository.
After struggling long-time with site-upkeep while working, I made it pass-word protected, and asked Google not to index it, years ago. But now I am working less, able to put more into the site, and it remains offline mainly so I can leisurely pursue Perfection. This is not the healthiest behavior, and I will try to get some therapy … and post my site with future Comments I make.
My WP site is almost completely updated, except I’m still blocking the new Gutenberg block-editor. But I’m a tech-pioneer sort, and furthermore had early CMS experience with a block-edited website (phpWebSite, an academic program from Appalachian U). I’m a bad-case plugin-junkie, and like to play with (desktop-friendly) Themes.
Mike has done a little more categorization-work than Neo, and he has them displayed down the side-bar, instead of all the way at the bottom. So you see ’em.
I like taking & organizing photographs, and I’m into genealogy, like Mike … tho we had kind of a spat in my family, and I have to keep it low-key. Mom’s favorite grandfather ended up splashed across the genealogy-world, and she was not_happy. Only saving grace has been that he’s also the grandfather of California cousins, whom mom wants to come to Reunions … and their share-crimes are worse than mine.
Trouble in the Social Media world, is opportunity for the Web & Internet that we would prefer to see. The only real cost is, it has to happen one individual effort & project at a time. 🙂
If you want a funny (sort of) example of the Democrat media in action, read the headlines in a search on Bing news for the Trump Grand Rapids rally
‘AOC sucks!’: Donald Trump Jr. points his father’s followers to a new villain, and a new rallying cry
The Washington Post
Donald Trump ‘The Sequel’ goes live in Grand Rapids, Mich. rally
USA Today
President Trump Portrays Himself as Vindicated and Vindictive at Michigan Rally After Mueller Report
Time (I thought they went out of business)
Why an anti-Ocasio-Cortez chant at a Trump rally was all but inevitable
Washington Post
It’s interesting how they are able to coordinate their slants. I don’t think there is a central organizer. They are more like schools of fish or flocks of birds who fly in coordinated swarms by watching their nearest neighbors.
I’m into genealogy, like Mike
I have something like 1450 in my family tree. This summer we are going back to Chicago again and will do some more research. My great great uncle is buried in the federal cemetery in Memphis.
Chicago & Memphis
Both of our sides still gather on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, but I half-expect the paternal side to shift back to the southwest soon (both dad’s lines answered Sam Houston’s call, in the 1830s, but New Mexico became the ancestral home) … although it could ‘honor’ an important branch in Montana, who are probably a bit shy about their unusual religion. (Which my mom tried, too, when I was little, and from the same sources.)
Dad left us a big project, and the communicable bug. I started up mom’s side, and it’s about like yours now. This side is out with Stephanie’s werewolves & vampires again this year (but we all grew up with them..). Working out good at Three Rivers, next to the La Push Reservation.
I was born in Forks … and dad was born in Roswell, New Mexico. 😎