Monday, October 26, 2020

Trump Says It Should Be Illegal for the Media to Cover the Pandemic

His inner fascist speaks again; as of right now 86,000 people agree with him:

10 comments:

David in Cal said...

David - Actually Trump said it should be illegal for the media to NOT cover certain aspects of the pandemic. BTW this was obvious hyperbole.

Cheers

David Appell said...

David: same thing. I think he’s serious, if he had his way.

David in Cal said...

David, no it's not the same thing. The media censors news that makes Trump look good. Trump opposes that censorship. Trump wants the media to report MORE news.
The way you put it, Trump would be wanting the media to report LESS news.

Cheers

Thomas said...

DiC, censorship and demanding newspapers to report government friendly propaganda isn't exactly the same thing, but both go against the idea of a free press. It is not censorship when newspapers choose what they report.

J. D. said...

Trump wants the media to report MORE news.

Trump has had a life of privilege surrounded by yes men. I think he actually believes the lies he tells and doesn't expect to be challenged on them. That's why he loses his temper and starts acting like a toddler having a tantrum.
It's not as if he only started acting this way since he ran for president. This is him in 1990 when an interviewer had the temerity to question the viability of a casino he was opening,
https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/24/media/trump-1990-walkout/

and a video of it,

https://youtu.be/fI2eFnPcFLM

note the similarity to his behavior on 60 minutes thirty years later. It turns out that the interviewer was right. The casino went bust.
Trump doesn't want more news. What he wants is the press not to do their job which is to hold politicians accountable and ask questions that the public want answered.
If Trump wants to be fauned over he knows he only has to pick up the phone and call Fox News.

David in Cal said...

Trump's complaint is valid.

TV Blasts Trump with 92% Negative Coverage; 66% Positive for Biden

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2020/10/27/never-more-biased-tv-blasts-trump-92-negative-coverage-66-positive

Cheers

Layzej said...

That is a bizarre thing to say. Negative coverage is not an indication of bias. Fair and balanced should not mean equal time for fact an fancy.

Thomas said...

DiC, Have you considered that Trump may deserve more negative coverage? Some of his insanities are pretty serious, like when he recently stated that Egypt was about to bomb Ethopia.

J. D. said...

DiC: You say Trump's complaint is valid by quoting a right wing source that says it exists to expose and combat liberal media bias. They are not a serious research organisation. It doesn't help their credibility either when their President and founder appears on Fox News and says that Obama looks like a "skinny ghetto crackhead". Their mission seems to be to own the libs rather than conduct serious research.
Anyway as Thomas suggests, maybe he deserved any negative coverage. For instance, during the period studied he seemed to be doing his best to help infect as many people with covid-19 as he could and then criticize Biden for taking measures that would minimize the risk.

Ned said...

"The media censors news that makes Trump look good."

Actually, the opposite is true. Trump gets a lot of bad press because he does and says a lot of awful things. But any individual one of those things gets much *less* news coverage than it deserves, because it's quickly buried under the avalanche of subsequent horrors and lies.

If you picked out any one of Trump's scandals, and reassigned it to Obama, Biden, HRC, or any other prominent Democratic politician, it would receive exponentially more media coverage.

But Trump generally gets less coverage for each individual scandal because when there are six of them in a single week there's no way to do each of them full justice.