Political campaigns, candidates, and the media used to have respect for truth. Otherwise, they'd be shamed and lose credibility, votes, and their audience. What happened?
Bonus: The latest media ethics scandal are people accusing JD Vance of saying he will "create stories" about the Springfield missing pets story. That's a lie. It is important to contextualize what he said on Sunday to CNN, which gets at the real issue:
"The evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened and, by the way, I‘ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months and the American media ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of Angel Moms who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country who then murdered their children. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat memes. If I have to, I mean, create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast," Vance said.
I agree that politicians and the media today have no compunction about spreading misinformation and outright lying. However, that is really nothing new. I recently read a biography of Aaron Burr in which several campaigns of that early era in American politics were described. Campaigns and candidates spread lies about their opponents and the newspapers were as blatantly biased as today's media. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose!
You won't get much of an argument from me. And competing papers around the start of the country were especially notorious. Some of it reemerged around the Civil War. But it does seem worse than it has in the past 50 years. Maybe it's because we lack the kind of refs we had back in the day.
Bonus: The latest media ethics scandal are people accusing JD Vance of saying he will "create stories" about the Springfield missing pets story. That's a lie. It is important to contextualize what he said on Sunday to CNN, which gets at the real issue:
"The evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened and, by the way, I‘ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months and the American media ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of Angel Moms who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country who then murdered their children. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat memes. If I have to, I mean, create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast," Vance said.
I agree that politicians and the media today have no compunction about spreading misinformation and outright lying. However, that is really nothing new. I recently read a biography of Aaron Burr in which several campaigns of that early era in American politics were described. Campaigns and candidates spread lies about their opponents and the newspapers were as blatantly biased as today's media. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose!
You won't get much of an argument from me. And competing papers around the start of the country were especially notorious. Some of it reemerged around the Civil War. But it does seem worse than it has in the past 50 years. Maybe it's because we lack the kind of refs we had back in the day.
Powerful and insightful. I loved the last photo of the voters from the Chicago grave yard