9 thoughts on “Stuff to Read While We Wait”

  1. Well, I’ve hung up my Make America Great Again hat.. and I feel better already. Believe me!
    Just one last gasp, OK?…Trump is a big bag of shit.

  2. Swami,
    Let’s hope that tonight, he goes back to stink-up t-RUMP Tower’s foyer as a FLAMING bag of shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  5. The Rosenberg article is great, and so is Rosen’s wisdom.  I especially liked the notion of veracity, verification, fact checking, or just plain BS metering of information as being part of the journalists job.  Never has it been quite as important as it has recently with he who I prefer not to mention. 

    I have some problems with the article from a rural perspective, however.  Let us take rural school district news for example.  No journalist was involved in the last place I worked.  The writers were employees of the school district.  The copy was pre-approved by the administration and printed verbatim by the local paper as far as I could tell.  It was printed as news, but as all employees knew, it was sometimes laughable, biased, district propaganda.  The voters and taxpayers had only this and local gossip to go on regarding the operation of the biggest publicly run operation in the area.  This was not an exceptionally small school district for the area.  They even had a daily paper unlike most local districts.

    Another problem of note in this area is simply opacity.  Public officials will not talk to the press.  In a recent case of an officer shooting a person with a disability, the opacity to the press was so extreme, the name of the person killed by the police was not released in the public record.  The officer involved was not named, and no information was given to television or newspaper journalists.  Many attempts were made, but no specific information was made available to journalists for several week.  Their reports were only that no official statements could be made as the incident was under investigation.  Specific information was only available from “yellow” journalism. 

    As the article so wisely states, “We need to know what people in power are doing and planning in order for us to cast an intelligent vote.”  You bet we do.  But perhaps the difference noted between rural America and the rest of the country is that the rest of the country has at least a chance of having a working fourth estate.  Rural America by in large is a fourth estate desert.

  6. Well, even though Trump will be defeated we haven’t seen the last of his antics. He’s riding herd on a whole bunch of crazy topped off with a supreme buzz of narcissism. He’s not going to quit cold turkey. I don’t know how he’s going to wind down from the adulation of his admirers, but I suspect he’s going to direct his fury at the GOP. He’s already got them on a leash, and it seems that’s the likely place for him to exercise his new found status as overlord of the GOP.
    Watch out Paulie Ryan..Hell hath no fury like Trump’s wrath on an uncommitted minion.

  8. The problem with trying to change the media is that most idiocrats are too far gone. They don’t trust anything remotely “MSM” so they wouldn’t care. They’ll always come up with ways to favor tribal rumor over fact-checking.

    I like the idea of their tribe hitting rock bottom, to then have reality finally set in, since of course, educating has no effect. Watching their beloved bouncy Trump clown car crash, with bags of shit alight, would sure be amusing. But would that be rock bottom?

Comments are closed.