Media Malpractice, Hoax Purveying, Misleading Narratives and Other Sins of the 4th Estate Thread

You don't need to get paid when you are robbing the country blind.

 

Not everybody fawns over her looks, or even cares.

 

I think it's fair to note that there was a large degree of hypocrisy involved when you consider the degree of nativism and xenophobia at the heart of the Trump campaign & Presidency versus the reality of Melania's own story and the treatment her parents got. But IMHO it should be that easy for all immigrants who want to come & live here, so the attacks on her which frame her story in terms of 'getting away' with something or 'cheating' while understandable were wrong-headed.

 

I went down the rabbit hole on this

It's likely she was exploited by Trump's modelling agency, or one of the other ones. The agencies tending to bring girls in without proper work permits and then exploit them as cheap talent, party fodder etc.

Trump astroturfed her career with some high profile shoots to get the visa.

You'd think a simple question like when did Trump meet Melania would have an easy answer, but from memory, there has been more than one version of that story.

 

Trump doesn't hate immigrants - he's married to one!

Trump isn't antisemitic - his daughter is Jewish!

etc

 

There is nothing about the Trumps which isn't sketchy as hell.

As I noted above--most Americans (including many liberals and other ostensibly anti-Trump types) still haven't fully reckoned with just how depraved and nihilistic the entire family is.

 

The conflation of systemic concepts like 'racism', 'antisemitism', 'misogyny' etc. have really become conflated with overt personal bigotry. It's made the discourse really stupid.

 

That's what I was alluding to when I mentioned her parents.

So many limp defenses of Trump (i.e., that accusations of being a fascist are overblown because he didn't commit [X] level of crimes against humanity) basically boil down to "He wasn't able to do all the horrible shit he might have been capable of because he lost re-election, certain institutional & constitutional limits, and his own laziness & incompetence." Basically the "Orange Man Bad!" type of eye-rolling pseudo-sophistication.

 

It's why I found the story of the Trump Inaugural so fascinating. All the side hustles and fraud combined with strange family rivalries - especially between Melania and Ivanka

No one has ever been charged over that IIRC

 

I blame the movies. People/families in movies are so typically unbelievable that we suspend disbelief. Because very few people really know or ever meet somebody like a Trump. So when we actually do meet somebody that is nihilistic like in movies, it is unbelievable. I'm kind of thinking meeting somebody actually like Max Cady from Cape Fear. No way that guy could exist in real life, yet somebody met that guy somewhere.

Which is unbelievable. We all know there was massive corruption surrounding the inaugural, it is so blatant.

 

Which is a counterpoint to this thread.

For all the failings around balance and framing, the media consistently did a good job of revealing Trump's criming and abuse of power.

The real failing has been by the justice system to hold powerful people accountable.

 

She was more symptom than disease, sure.

Lots of men of a certain age get a very fixed notion of how/when they looked good (whether in a mirror, in the eyes of others--whatever) and get VERY attached to it. That explains the hair and the spray tan. The suits? I'm thinking that's similar to his love of well done steaks drenched in ketchup; the man has absolutely no taste and doesn't want to have to think about much of anything, least of all whether fashion and/or his measurements have changed. Couple that with a powerful narcissists tendency to surround himself with groveling sycophants, and--viola!

 

That's a bit of revision. The majority of the media didn't do shit for 2 to 3 years of the Trump presidency. There were a few, but not neary as many there are now.

 

One of the interesting aspects of the Trump regime is he intentionally blurred the line between where the mafia capos stop and White House officials begin.

e.g Don jr had no rule, yet was a clear underboss. Ivanka was a mob boss and white house official. Jared had an official role, but was also clearly a consigliere. Then you have bag men like Parscale who are employed by the Trump campaign - a wholly independent crime organisation masquerading as political force.

I see Melania as a symbol, not so different to Magda Goebbels. She stands for the virility and power of the crime boss.

I mean clearly the guy just has really bad taste which is why he has been mocked in NY circles forever.

But I also think he plays a role for television. It used to be better packaged, but he is old and fuddled these days. But one feedback you here from the MAGAe is they think Trump is funny. That is why making a clown of himself with the absurd YMCA dancing works for him, though it is so cringe.

 

I don't really agree. He was plagued by scandal, including the Russia scandal, even before he took office.

So I agree the media failed in so many ways, but we can't say they didn't tell us just what a crook this guy is.

 

Or the one time a younger woman kinda/sorta/maybe gave him the once-over look in a hallway back when it didn't matter how he combed his hair.

 

You're letting them off the hook. The media doesn't just passively report shit, they frame narratives. They choose how to frame things. They choose what to focus on.

The public need repetition in order for an impression to stick. It's a tired cliche by now, but "But Her Emails!" really does encapsulate the problem. Trump had a lot of dirt, going back decades, but the media never picked one thing to hammer away at.

This is, after all, the same media that treated Trump's birther attacks on Obama as news when they story should have been "Shit, the guy who hosts 'The Apprentice' is pretty racist, huh?"

 

I'm not attached to it, I'm just never getting older than 29.