The path it took to get there: 2004: Dems win 51%-45%, lose four seats, Senate sits at 44-55* 2006: Dems win 53%-42%, gain 5 seats, Senate sits at 49-49** 2008: Dems win 52%-45%, gain 8 seats, Senate sits at 57-41** * Jim Jeffords was an Independent from Vermont ** Bernie Sanders and Joe Leiberman were Independents from Vermont and Connecticut respectively It took them three elections in a row of crushing popular vote victories just to get into the majority, including one where they lost seats. As for the 60 seat majority, it lasted less than a year in between the time Arlen Specter switched parties and Ted Kennedy died.
Dude... if you think this is why people don't trust the press anymore I'm really at a loss as to what to tell you. Trump has an expiration date. He shouldn't have said what he did, but he'll be gone in 2 years. The press is going to suck for a lot longer than that. We've been on that road ever since people became way more obsessed with hating the "bad guys" and stereotyping them in utterly ridiculous ways rather than holding their politicians accountable. The liberals can pretend it's just the republicans when they stop nominating people like Hillary and reelecting people like Menendez.
People don't trust the press because They were told not to They were either never taught, or never learned, how to consume media. You've got people who couldn't pass a high school stats class yelling about how the "polls lied." They don't even speak the language of polls and are somehow convinced the information they can't understand is a lie.
"Ignore them, they are FAKE NEWS" is working on a scarily large part of the population. People are now to the point where they're only believing what they want to be true. This is not being helped by news agencies, on ALL sides, skewing information to better suit their own narratives and agendas. Some are blatantly obvious, some are not. Even my own mother is starting to understand how it's all being filtered and altered. She watches something on CSPAN live, then flips to CNN, and she gets puzzled... "that's not what he just said... why are they saying that?" The light is slowly dawning on her that being a skeptic is a good thing. But you're absolutely right... people, for the most part, do NOT know how to consume media; social, news, whatever the channel. There's a reason the numbers of antivaxxers and flat earth idiots are growing... people just choose not to believe the stuff they don't want to believe in. Facts or strong evidence be damned. That somehow becomes their own personal truth, which is OK with them. It's going to be a huge problem moving forward, and I'm not sure how it gets fixed.
Thats why I subscribe to publications like the Wall Street Journal and 2 others. Sure, their editorials are biased one way or another, but the regular journalism is not quite as beholden to advertiser dollars and therefore fly-by headlines full of bullshit or news stories based on whats trending on Twitter.
Nobody trusts the news anymore because the news is politicized. Trump starts calling any negative press about him fake news. Obama tried banning Fox News from the White House press room. When a news organization invariably makes a mistake, one side calls it a mistake, and the other calls it a conspiracy. The news doesn't suck for the reasons you think it does. It only appears to suck because viewers on one side doesn't like what that news organization is reporting. That reporting is fucking with the narrative in their head about the other side, which pisses them off. Look at the posts on this thread about the media. Anything that gets reported that pokes a hole in a narrative about what someone believes gets called into question. And for the most part, it isn't the content of the article. It's about who wrote it, why it was written, and what side benefits from the coverage. Being critical of a news source makes sense in an age where social media memes spread like the clap. But I think if people actually read what was being written instead of immediately discounting it based on where it came from (especially in terms of major media outlets and local newspapers), it might actually do some good.
I would second the WSJ. Sure, the opinion columns are biased, but they're supposed to be... they're opinion columns.
Nah the press holds no responsibility in their own perception, it's because we're all rubes. Couldn't be the supposedly objective press being nakedly partisan. Im not even talking the deep end they've went off with Trump or the infotainment clickbait it's become. My brother was a lead project manager on a local government real estate development project his company was vying for in Miami. Like most urban development projects people were protesting in the city council that it was just trying to drive the homeless out and gentrify the area. His company was just a contractor in the whole situation the local government extended an offer to compete for. The lead reporter for one of the local papers had been vocally opposed to the project. Short of outright lies the paper wildly mischaracterized and misquoted his company and it was a real eye opener to see how "objective" an institution that touts itself as objective really is. Part of me thinks the notion of the press being an objective over watcher of our democracy is just pure fantasy. The objectivity part was just injected angle in the mid 20th century and for most of America's history was openly partisan. In some parts we are just regressing back to our roots.
No, it's because they outright lie. Having a slant is one thing, making up shit wholesale is another. It's not because I'm so biased I don't give them a chance, it's because they've ruined their reputation by being full of shit. I don't understand how someone can pretend this is debatable.
But it's not objective. That's part of knowing how to consume media. You're not supposed to just swallow everything they tell you wholesale. But that doesn't mean you reject everything they tell you wholesale either. You understand your sources, their methods, their reputations, you balance your media diet, you follow up on particularly large claims, etc. The problem is people finding out that one source isn't perfect, so they assume that they're all equally imperfect, and then just pick the bottom-of-the-barrel rag that feeds their anger or narcissism.
So... what happened to crazy caravan that was going to invade the border, and troops had to be sent down? Did they go away? Are they no longer a threat? I ask because it's been a couple days since I've heard anything about it, and it's no longer on Fox's front page. Cynical me thinks that the mid-term elections are over, so there's no need to push that story any more.
Yep. All that. It would've been nice if Trump had instead started calling it "biased news" instead of fake news, because that's what it is. Then that could help with what Aetius is talking about with how people consume it. If people understood that CNN has a bias one way, and Fox another, people would chill out a bit. Of course Fox / Sanders / whomever is going to boil Acosta's interaction down to an assault, and of course if Sean Hannity had done that to an Obama staffer, CNN would've called for his head.
Honest question for you... do you think that the coverage of the caravan was used to rile up Republicans to get them to vote?
I'm not speaking for Clutch . . . I don't know if coverage was used that way by Fox or other right-leaning media any more than their regular right-leaning coverage of other issues. But, for candidates? Absolutely they used it to get the vote out. A lot of candidates posted pictures on their Twitter "I won't let this happen" or "I stand for secure borders" etc.
Pretty much, yeah. People a thousand miles away on foot constituting as some sort of “threat” was pretty much a propaganda piece from the start.
I disagree with that. Was it used as a propaganda piece? Sure, but it's a real issue. Europe faced a real crisis 2-3 years ago (and still is) from overwhelming refugee migration, and having a debate about offering asylum to those who need it, versus fighting back invaders is most definitely the role of a government sworn to protect it's citizens. So, the news should cover that. It's not like just Fox was discussing the caravan. Don't think that caravan just started because some neighbors got together. It was started by a politician organizing them, and the ones interviewed were coached on the right phrases to use.
Europe was facing 100,000 migrants per month actually reaching Europe, across routes less well controlled than the US border, consisting mostly of people from active war zones, and the end result was still vastly overblown. The US is facing 5,000 people and dropping (as many find asylum or choose to stay in Mexico), marching to known ports of entry, in a country more than capable of processing those asylum requests. We have literally zero to fear from the caravan.
Totally agree. I guess what is so frustrating is that the resolution to said issue was boiled down to "build a wall" and I don't think the current administration has the desire or the skill set to do something other than that. I also think that they use fear-mongering tactics to get people to side with their stance. "Muggers and rapists and drug dealers are coming". It's like health care... these are hard problems that will not have a solution that will make everyone happy, but reasonable effort should go into resolving these issues so that at least some sort of compromise can be reached. But compromise isn't part of the current political climate. So until then, I guess it's "do what you have to do to get your way, even if it includes lying and fear mongering".
Ok let's do the last three elections to get the full Senate: 2014: Republicans win 25M-21M votes and win 24-12 seats 2016: Democrats win 51M-40M votes and win 12-22 seats 2018: Democrats win 46M-34M votes and win 23-12 seats So in total Democrats win the vote by 118M-99M and lose the seats by 58-47