Another Media Win!

Liberals, Listen up!

Sometimes when liberals think they are winning they are losing.    And it is happening again.

Trump incompetent vs. Trump showing strength.   Yesterday this blog noted that the controversy of the day--Trump's tiff with Mexico--was understood by the left as a sign of Trump's foreign policy incompetence, the dangerous bull in a china shop.  No. A great many people saw it as Trump letting Mexico know that we are on top and they are the small, poor, weak country we can push around, and a great many American thought it was high time we asserted ourselves and Trump was putting the natural order of things back in place.

Two views: Trump creates disorder or Trump restores order.

Americans saw the same event and understood the story in very different ways.

It is happening again today.  The Trump executive order on refugees was bound to create chaos at America's airports.  Chaos is taking place at JFK and Dulles and DWF and LAX.   

What is going on?   Answer:  a media war that Trump is winning.

What good liberals are watching on MSNBC and in the mainstream media is:

   1. Breaking News Chaos.

   2. Reporters standing with microphones and noisy crowds behind them.

   3. References to the ACLU and to professors and to lawyers and to "constitutional scholars."

   4. References to federal judges and "stays."

   5. Families and friends of the detained being jostled and in a noisy airport expressing outrage, complaining about Trump causing chaos.

   6. Environment of crowd noise and disruption.

Liberals see Court; Conservatives see Disruption

What Trump supporters are watching is essentially the same thing.  But what they are seeing and integrating into their mindset is disruption and disorder and strange people trying to enter America and Trump acting decisive to say these people may be dangerous.  They see a battle between these disrupters (aided by ACLU lawyers with all their technicalities) versus a plain spoken man who said maybe amid the disruption there may be dangerous people.  The ACLU is positioned as fighting not for "regular Americans" and their rights but for outsiders/others who are trying to get into America.

The quick optics of the situation pits disruption vs. safety.   Simple as that.

Aren't the facts way more complicated?  Of course, but the complications are for the people who are paying close attention, for people who understand immigration law and Visa requirements and Green Cards and the potential certification of class action lawsuits by federal judges: very few people.

Fox view:  Trump restores order.

Readers of this blog need to remember that only 56% of eligible Americans of voting age actually voted in the presidential election.  Some have a great reason for not voting:  some are comatose in hospice, some had family emergencies, etc., but the overwhelming reason people did not vote was that they didn't care very much.  Most people don't pay all that close attention.  They get quick impressions on who stands for what and this is the basis for their voting behavior, at least among swing voters who decide elections.

They see a simple, clear drama:  scruffy people in disrupted airport crowds clamoring on behalf of people trying to get into America and Trump saying not-so-fast, safety first.   This is a win for Trump.   

People who can name the federal judges practicing in their states and their likelihood of supporting a stay on a presidential order are less than one in a hundred and they already know how they will vote.  The vast majority of people aren't that interested.  They get quick impressions of who is on what side and it solidifies their pre-existing view of the world. 

Trump appears to be on the side of regular Americans who don't want their airports disrupted by outside agitators backed by the ACLU.

Meanwhile, in Saigon. . . . 

Thad Guyer writes his own thoughts on optics and MSNBC with what he says was a dream about Rachel Maddow.

"Dreaming of Rachel Maddow”

I dreamed of Rachel Maddow last night. We were snapping selfies as we mused over America’s culture wars. “You went all InfoWars tonight”, I chided her, as we leaned against some kind of a wall beneath a warm sun. Secure in our camaraderie, I jokingly needled her about her show’s ongoing conspiracy theory of Russians stealing the election from Hillary. I woke up just as passersby were photographing us.

Freud isn’t needed to interpret: I listen to Rachel’s podcasts at bedtime, and my dream was triggered by anxiety both over Trump, and my friends thinking I’ve gone to the dark side in my Upclose guest posts. I think a lot these days about my real life socialist journalist friend in Paris who warned me about the fate of Trotskyites—politicos who break from orthodoxy yet remain in the fold. His warnings to fellow socialists about overreach subjected him to biting criticism.  

My limerent* dream coalesced my support for Rachel despite increasingly sounding like InfoWars, that online conspiracy show that inspires millions of conservative viewers. News is not fake if it’s presented merely as conspiracy theory, no matter how outrageous the claims. InfoWars packages its accusations against the diabolical left as “you heard it here first”, connecting the dots of thin facts into big alarming pictures. It’s entertaining, feeds viewer ideology, and calls them to political action. That’s what Rachel is now doing in her MSNBC slot, unapologetically positioning her show as a bulkhead of activism, pressure and resistance in protecting the American Way from Trump.

The night of my dream, she had hyped the unholy Trump-Putin conspiracy with new opaque facts about the arrest of two KGB agents. These arrests, she speculated, may be the Kremlin silencing spooks who leaked information to the former British MI6 private eye who compiled the Moscow Ritz prostitution dossier on Trump. Rachel thinks the MI6 guy is hiding not from the paparazzi but from Russians with poison-tipped umbrellas. Alternatively, the New York Times reported “anonymous sources” speculating that the arrested KGB agents might have been CIA informants about “Putin’s direct involvement” in defeating Clinton. I also listened to a New Yorker podcast with the Buzzfeed editor who published the prostitution dossier, defending himself that its not fake news as long as it’s prefaced with the warning that it might all be bogus— "let the reader decide what’s true”, he proclaimed.

Why do I like the conspiracy theories, and accept that it’s ok as long as Rachel and Buzzfeed are upfront that it might all be wrong? Dreaming of Rachel answered my questions: Trump is so adept in manipulating public opinion, and so effective paired with a Republican Congress, that the left seems unable to slow his excesses armed only with conventional rules of journalism. The Buzzfeed editor was explicit on this point, demanding it’s up to a younger generation of bloggers to do what “legacy media” will not in delegitimizing Trump. He dismissed criticisms of him as “spurious”.

Might eroding journalistic convention open a Pandora’s box we’ll later regret? It this like gutting the filibuster to get Obama’s appointees though during our delusion that “a new Democratic majority” would guarantee a Clinton win? Is Trump such a threat that it’s worth the risk? I fear not, but in dreaming about Rachel Maddow, I learned this: It feels good to watch dueling fake news, alternative facts, and conspiracies. While I support Trump’s core policies such as trade and secure borders, his raw political power invites unprecedented abuses. If Trump has so disemboweled the press from succeeding in its critical role of checking that power within conventional journalistic norms, then the ends may well justify the means. But I doubt it. 

*Limerent.  You don't run into this word every day.   It means infatuated and obsessed, but not necessarily sexually.  I had to look it up.  Peter Sage.