The Trump spectacle is overshadowing the more urgent scandals of this administration

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 12, 2018 at 10:09:39 PDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Trump spectacle is overshadowing the more urgent scandals of this administration
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Trump spectacle is overshadowing the more urgent scandals of this administration
> By Katrina vanden Heuvel
> Jun 12 2018
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-spectacle-is-overshadowing-the-more-urgent-scandals-of-this-administration/2018/06/12/62c800d8-6d81-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html>
>
> Breaking news: President Trump tweeted. He’s feuding with a foreign leader — or a football team. Special counsel 
> Robert S. Mueller III is investigating the administration.
>
> In today’s media environment, these “breaking” political news alerts are nearly constant. They dominate cable news 
> and serve primarily to agitate rather than inform. Though the tendency to focus on spectacle over substance is not a 
> new media phenomenon, it has noticeably worsened under the influence of a president who has devoted his public life 
> to making a spectacle of himself. And as recent events have shown, it is leaving little to no oxygen for important 
> issues that have real consequences on the American people’s lives.
>
> Perhaps the most brazen example is the media’s neglect of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. Last month, a new Harvard 
> study estimated that 4,645 deaths can be linked to the storm and its immediate aftermath, a toll far higher than the 
> official estimate of 64. If accurate, that’s more than the number of Americans killed on 9/11 or during the Iraq War. 
> Yet on the day it was released, the study was treated as an afterthoughton cable news, which instead dedicated hours 
> to the controversy over Trump-supporting actress Roseanne Barr’s racist tweets. Worse, as James Downie wrote in The 
> Post, “On the major Sunday talk shows — the purest distillation of what the media and political establishments 
> consider worth discussing — not once was Puerto Rico mentioned. That is a disgrace.”
>
> This malpractice is part of a broader problem of media, led by the cable networks, failing to pay attention to the 
> lived experiences and struggles of millions of Americans. On occasion, stories such as the recent wave of teacher 
> protests in red states, including West Virginia and Oklahoma, manage to break through the noise, but they are the 
> exceptions. Meanwhile, the ongoing assault on organized labor and workers’ rights, rising health insurance premiums 
> resulting from Republican sabotage and the far-reaching effects of climate change barely register in the overall 
> coverage. The situation has gotten so bad, some Democrats have actually stopped trying to spread their message 
> through cable news. “It’s impossible,” one Senate aide told the Daily Beast, “unless you want to talk about Russia.”
>
> Indeed, more than a year into the special counsel’s inquiry, the Trump-Russia story continues to receive a 
> disproportionate amount of the media’s attention. There is no question that several actual developments in the 
> investigation have been newsworthy. But the same cannot be said of the unsubstantiated rumors and wild speculation 
> that receive breathless coverage day after day, adding nothing to the country’s knowledge and drowning out stories 
> that matter. During a six-week stretch in 2017, for example, the Intercept found that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow 
> “covered Russia not just more than any other issue, but more than every other issue combined.” 
>
> Despite these shortcomings, some in the media are making contributions to the public debate. For instance, MSNBC host 
> Chris Hayes’s recent coverage of the impact of Trump’s immigration policies has been invaluable, offering a powerful 
> example of what cable news in the Trump era can be. (Disclosure: Hayes is a former Washington editor and current 
> editor at large for the Nation.) Hayes has also made a concerted effort to get out of the media bubble, hosting town 
> halls with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in such places as McDowell County, W.Va., and Kenosha, Wis., and forums on gun 
> violence and racism in Chicago and Philadelphia.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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