[Halfassed posts like this one are those which languish as drafts because I can’t be bothered to come back and clean them up.]
Every political journalist in America has figured out that everything Trump knows about the world, he learned by watching TV news. If Trump is the man created by TV news, we can then study Trump to find out what the news does to people. Trump is the media’s personalized Black Mirror. They don’t see it.
Jay Rosen provides one way to think about political news:
http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/#p9
Three impoverished ideas:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
[Kevin Drum blogs for Mother Jones, so he isn’t really an example of “the media.” But he is what inspired this post and I can’t be bothered to find a similar example from the MSM.]
Kevin Drum is confused about this from the National Review, emphasis Kevin's:
But then he launches into what I can only call a postmodern deconstruction of the meaning of Trump. Or, actually, maybe it’s the exact opposite of postmodern. Anyway, here it is:
The real problem here is…that he’s basically openly mocking the idea that words in politics mean anything at all….That’s the subversive, somewhat cleansing but ultimately corrosive part of Trump’s brand of political performance art: he’s talking to people who by and large think that politicians never mean anything they say, and he’s out there telling them, you’re right. We can say anything we want and none of it matters. It’s all a racket. Hey, how ’bout you and I call each other traitors and then punch the clock at the end of the day and get a drink together? Maybe our political class really has earned being treated this way, but every time Trump does it, he makes it harder to rebuild the broken norms he inherited and has treated with such contempt.
This is either brilliant or full of shit. I’m really not sure which.
Where did Trump and the people he’s talking to get their ideas of politics? Why do they believe it’s all lies? See Jay Rosen, above.