TRANSCRIBED BY JAMES PITCHERELLA - 12:47 MINUTES
“I think the… Republican Party has terminal cancer… It started off at stage one when the Tea Party came in power through to Sarah Palin & all of that. But I believe that it went untreated. And I believe that right now it has metastasized in a way that it cannot be just cut out.
Trump is not the cancer. Trump is a symptom of the cancer. I mean you also see people like Matt Gaetz & Margery Taylor Greene & Ted Cruze.
I mean there’s a whole MAGA and that movement is the cancer. And unfortunately the Party consists of mostly of MAGA now.
What Trump did that was very, very unfortunate but a very smart choice for what he wanted to do in this country. He made people question what is real and what is not.
People don’t know whether or not they can believe the news anymore. They don’t know what they can trust. And with that what he’s done is he has completely destabilized this party.
They have piled into conspiracy theories. They have piled into cruelty. Things that did not represent things that Americans want to represent. The City on the Hill. The embrace for the rest of the world.
And so what he’s done to the Republican Party means there’s no coming back for the Republican Party.
This country is always more stable when we have two stable parties. Right now the Republicans are completely off the rails. And I don’t see a way back for them. - The Lincoln Project’s Ryan Wiggins
Ryan Wiggins is Chief of Staff for the Lincoln Project.
“CHAOS AT TRUMP HQ Trump campaign goes broke as Republican funds used to pay off legal bills/ Ryan Wiggins”
London Times is owned by Murdoch. It can’t be long before U.S. media begins to be critical of the what is erroneously labeled the Republican Party.
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James Risen on why we don't get journalism in U.S. corporate press:
Over the last few years, as it grew increasingly likely that Donald Trump would mount a third campaign for the White House, leading press critics and others in the media vowed that this time had to be different. The press couldn’t fail in its coverage of Trump once again.
This time, it must aggressively investigate Trump while focusing coverage on the threat that he poses to democracy. The stakes for the nation in the election, not just the odds of who was likely to win the campaign, should be front and center in the press coverage, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argued.
But the change in coverage hasn’t happened. Instead, the press has doubled down on horse-race coverage, proving unable to alter its traditional formula for campaign coverage. Distracted by the campaign’s dramatic moments, highlighted by the attempted assassination of Trump and President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, day-to-day, process-driven coverage of the campaign remains paramount. Horse-race coverage is back in full force, and the threat Trump poses to democracy is now an afterthought….
But the press seems to have amnesia. It is as if journalists have forgotten that Trump was impeached twice, criminally indicted four times, and already convicted once. He should be facing three more criminal trials this year in the midst of the campaign, but he’s so far been saved from that fate by a series of shockingly partisan rulings by judges that he appointed.
Yet the insurrection, the indictments, the criminal conviction, the impeachments tend to receive little more than brief mentions in the Trump campaign coverage today. Poll-driven horse-race stories now dominate, overwhelming the scattered attempts by the press to hold Trump accountable...
Television also came of age as a political force in 1960, and the nationally televised Kennedy–Nixon debates changed the relationship between candidates and the press. The television networks became more powerful at the expense of newspapers and weekly news magazines. Presidential campaigns were now dominated by televised visuals, and reporters in turn focused their coverage on the imagery and symbolism of campaigns, rather than the substance. Which candidate was best on television became the story.
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That transformation was captured in “The Selling of the President 1968,” another seminal campaign book that documented the way in which Madison Avenue advertising and marketing executives were able to remake and polish Nixon’s image, propelling him to victory after he was beaten by the more telegenic Kennedy in 1960. The book, by Joe McGinniss, was the first cynical examination of how television and advertising were changing campaigns, and it convinced political reporters that they should focus much of their coverage on the marketing gurus behind the candidates. That led their reporting even deeper into the weeds of the campaign process — and the horse race…
In the 1980s, broadcast television was revolutionized with the shift from film to video, which made it possible for network reporters to file more often and more quickly from the field. At the same time, the founding of CNN in 1980 ushered in the era of cable news, taking full advantage of new commercial satellite technology and the shift from film to video to fill endless hours of daily campaign coverage. The gaping maw of the 24-hour news cycle led to a constant hunger for new content, which meant that minor campaign process stories were treated like big news on an endless loop.
Cable news was followed by the rise of the internet and social media, which led to even greater demands for quick hits from the campaign trail. After Twitter was founded in 2006, many of its earliest and most avid users were political journalists, who used it to track campaigns on a minute-by-minute basis. No tactical decision by a campaign was too trivial for reporters to catalog on their Twitter feeds.
These trends all converged with the 2007 founding of Politico; its business model was built around the idea that it would cover politics faster and in shorter bites than the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media. Politico was unabashedly focused on horse-race coverage, and it soon was setting the tone in Washington for daily campaign reporting. Before long, Politico alumni were being hired by every major media outlet, and the Politico style of horse-race coverage came to dominate the entire political journalism landscape.
The brutal financial pressures facing news organizations today have also had a big impact on political coverage.
Demands for more web traffic have forced news organizations to put a priority on quickly written breaking news stories that help generate hourly attention. Few news organizations now can afford to have reporters take the time required to dig deeply. Horse-race coverage — quick and easy to write or broadcast — is perfect for today’s attention-deficit news landscape. And, at a time of intense political polarization, horse-race coverage has the added benefit of helping news organizations insulate themselves from criticism that they are too partisan.
But there are costs for news organizations caused by their horse-race obsession — costs that many in the business still don’t comprehend. Horse-race coverage is substance-free journalism that simply recounts which candidate is up and which one is down. That means that in addition to a lack of investigative and accountability journalism, there is also a dearth of in-depth stories on policies and issues…
Trump was one of the first candidates to fully embrace the new ways available to campaigns to skirt the press. In 2016, political reporters were not prepared for Trump’s prolific use of social media, which enabled him to speak directly to his supporters and influence the campaign narrative on an hourly basis. Reporters found themselves writing daily stories about each Trump tweet, which had the effect of allowing Trump to hijack the horse-race coverage.
The trend among campaigns to ignore the press and its fixation on horse-race coverage reached new levels at last week’s Democratic National Convention, where more than 200 online influencers were credentialed by the Democratic Party to post content for their followers on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. That move deeply angered some in the traditional political press, but the Democrats saw it as a way to communicate more directly with young people and others turned off by conventional campaign coverage.
Yet the political press still doesn’t understand that campaigns are going around them in part because of their obsession with the horse race. They don’t get the connection.
And so horse-race coverage is likely to keep its iron grip on political journalism — an arrangement that leaves candidates unchallenged, important questions unasked, and voters uninformed. It’s an arrangement that Trump is eager to exploit.
MORE AT:
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Intercept
Why the Media Won’t Report the Truth About Trump
The political press has doubled down on horse-race coverage of the election, overlooking the threat Trump poses to democracy.
August 28 2024, 9:09 a.m.
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