Martin Krøger: Seeing a headline from our Danish public broadcaster that translates to this: “Trump dumps shit from ‘King Trump’ plane on protestors in new AI-video”. It made me wonder if any of the major news organizations in the US wrote up the story of that insane video with anything resembling that level of directness? In other words, did any big outlet (or any of their reporters on social media) accurately describe what everyone watching saw with their own eyes?
Always nice to kick things off with an easy one! The answer, depending on how you define “major news organization,” is no. They covered it, they all seemed implicitly to acknowledge that Trump posting this video carried news significance. But essentially none of them could bring themselves to describe the video accurately.
of rounded up some of the most notable headlines, which explain why “brown liquid” has become a bit of an inside joke among liberal media critics and Trump foes:This is mostly an old story about the dysfunctional culture of mainstream American political news, and why those outlets go out of their way to sanitize the noxious things Trump does. I’ve been writing and talking for years about how the professional mores of mainstream journalism are outmatched by right-wing bad faith.
wrote a deeper critique of the coverage of this specific incident.But this is also a story about Democrats.
Mainstream media should do better. But a big reason the political press would fixate on this story if the parties were reversed is that Republicans would emote angrily, and in unison, about a Democrat doing something so obscene. Here, by contrast, is the president of American Bridge—a Democratic Super PAC—celebrating the fact that the mainstream media downplayed the A.I. shit-dumping story. He thinks controversies like this won’t persuade many people to oppose Trump, but that if journalists treat it as a scandal, it might crowd out more helpful storylines.
This is how the overwhelming majority of Democratic strategists and consultants think. What Republicans understand that Dems do not is that there’s value in hyperventilating about any story that makes the opposition look bad. If it doesn’t catch on, fine, move along to the next one. “But what if it crowds out the master narrati-” NO, who cares, be angry about everything that’s genuinely infuriating about your opponents. The result will be to create an unpleasant miasma around them that is more powerful than any collection of lab-perfect lines of persuasion.
I’m not losing sleep over the fact that the feces fighter-jet story didn’t make a bigger splash (so to speak) but I do wish Democrats thought harder about how public opinion takes shape—to consider the psychological and social layers, not just the quantitative one. They might realize that it’s usually not by scaling up a message that seems to be persuasive in an intimate or controlled setting.
lauren: As we lament the lack of fierce Democrats, the campaign against Graham Platner is in full force. Can you imagine the difference between having him in the Senate versus old Janet Mills, part of the same old clique that is doing nothing?
With apologies to Lauren, who submitted this question before the most recent Platner scandal came to light, I have a real issue with the guy now. Or at least I think I do. My hang up isn’t any past indiscretion, even the Nazi skull tattoo that’s engulfed his campaign in a firestorm. It’s about trust.
Let me explain.
There are, to my mind, about five ways someone like Platner could end up in this tattoo predicament. In descending order of seriousness, they are: