Agreed.
It’s a total fantasy, but that is why I would give Marjorie what she wants and just let them go, split the US down the middle into blue and red. The chuds are lost forever…let them live with the consequences of their decisions.
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All about the culture war. Black Mexican trans people coming over the border making Mickey Mouse gay or something.
I’m not even sure that it is anymore. There is just no common ground between them on any issue. It’s already de facto two different countries.
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Imagine the process of extracting one from the other though…
Would make Brexit look like pulling apart two fighting toddlers.
It was a bizarre spectacle. A room full of mostly Republican voters lobbing mostly softball questions at Trump and lapping up and applauding most of what he said, even though it was just the same refrain he’s always given. A massively liberal “moderator” who insisted on asking more questions than the audience was allowed to ask and thus getting into little sidebar tiffs with Trump in which she insisted on having the last word.
Then afterwards, the two panels, almost all of them clearly outraged their employer had scheduled the spectacle. Chirping their own echo chamber banter (also predictable) back and forth until the token Republican congressman was allowed (or tried) to speak. He couldn’t get three words out before they were shouting him down.
Sounds like a real hoot!
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CNN is a shambles
https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1656646348572073984?s=20
The state of this pelican…poor bastard didn’t get to hear Donald’s foreign policy platform…
https://twitter.com/gimikd/status/1656651889226776577?t=MZpf4AAgRluu3Z5qGEoEqA&s=19
Yep, the only thing stopping Trump opining in meaningful and insight ways on his foreign policy priorities was the rude lady talking over him.
I think I actually understand where people are coming from when the applaud his absurd response about the debt ceiling because its largely a troll like “burn it all down” type attitude to politics. They understand he’s full of shit, but he’s full of shit in a way that will hurt the people they perceive to have hurt them. These fucking people, the types who continue to act like there is a serious person with actual coherent thoughts buried somewhere in that ball of goo…you seriously have to question how many times in a week they put their shoes on before their socks
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From the bits I’ve seen , she did a good job of not putting up with his bluster. Evidenced by him having to insult her.
From what Ive seen she did about as well as expected, but it was a no win situation. The only win she could have taken a win was in refusing to participate. It was journalistic malpractice for everyone involved.
I don’t really get why they afforded him a platform either , particuarly in front of such a partisan audience. The strategy presumably was 'Give him enough rope … ’ , but we all know how well that turned out for them in 2016.
The reason is because Licht is even more of a hack than Zucker, he just pretends he isnt and has people spending a lot of capital trying to convince people of his narrative.
Clearly about trying to drive more eyeballs to a struggling network, but a weird place to start. Would be interesting to know what the ratings turned out to be. If the stated goal was to drive CNN toward the center, not sure that was a great start. They don’t really have the staff to be centrist anyway. Would need nearly all new on-air talent.
I think CNN is centrist.
Trump is so far to the extreme right that a centrist political position looks leftist by comparison.
I watched the first half an hour or so, then could stand no more of listening to Trump and watching his fawning audience cheer and applaud him. It was an appalling spectacle on that front.
Kaitlyn Collins did well in not putting up with Trump’s BS and lies, and she helped to straighten the record inasmuch as she wouldn’t let his continual lies go.
The set up for me was all wrong, as it was an audience of Trump supporters, or at least leaning that way.
That enabled a very poor dynamic to develop, where Trump, ever the ringmaster in his own circus, would regularly appeal to the audience, in a knowing way, to sort of get the whole room going against the interviewer.
It told me nothing, other than Trump remains utterly unfit for office.
I think it was a gross mistake for a serious news channel like CNN to give Trump the oxygen of its public platform.
Licht is a wrong 'un.
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Many of the criticisms of the Zucker era were justified. It was simply too much of an entertainment platform rather than a news one. Licht’s comment that he’d rather lose eyeballs in the US in favour of the restoration of their worldwide credability, something that has more value in the long run, probably has a lot of a merit and is a reasonable goal for the network in moving on from Zucker. The problem is the things they identified as being the specific problems with the Zucker era are misguided (indistinguishable from fox news complaints that says even coverage is not 50-50 good vs bad then its biased) and the actions they are taking are the opposite of what is needed to restore actual credibility. What they are doing is doing the things RW ideologues say news should do to treat them fairly, which is clearly not the same thing.
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My suspicion is Licht knows hes talking shit, but is saying the things the he needs to say for the people who cover his network to present his moves as one being done to be more “fair and balanced”.
Its the news network equivalent of a politics reporter reporting on clear lies told to them by an elected official, lies from a known lying liar, yet are still reported on overly credulously as if there was no reason to contextualize that the lying liar is actually lying.
CNN in its infancy and for much of its history in the 80s and 90s was. Even more recently (like ten years ago) they were positioned a bit centrally to right wing Fox and left wing MSNBC. The problem is the middle has shrunk into near oblivion, which pushed CNN left. Most of their moderators are little more than a mouthpiece for Democratic Party positions. It’s part of what makes Licht’s decision a head scratcher. What middle?
Last night was terrible, I agree, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing. Watching the panels moan was even funnier.
One of the challenges with this discourse is what people mean, or think they mean, when using words like center or moderate. Most people think they mean taking a reasonable middle point between two legitimate arguments, taking what is good from argument and a bit of what is good from the other. But that requires you call out bad arguments for what they are. So what people who call for moderation really mean is an identity not an ideology. One that is willing to split the difference regardless of the arguments being made. One that says to be fair you must treat an objectively bad thing with as much positive coverage as negative coverage. It requires that if one person is arguing for free college tuition for people whose parents earn less than 60k and the other is demanding the ritual sacrifice of every family’s first 2 children, the modern moderate/centrist will say the appropriate position is merit based scholarships (earned via tax breaks rather than direct payment or waivers of bills) and the sacrifice of only 1 child…and you even get to pick the child you like least because compromise!
CNN was definitely centrist in that context with its coverage of the 2016 election, with the only thing they covered more than Trump’s campaign rallies were faux controversy over benghazi and Clinton’s emails. In the years since they jumped on Trump far more, but not because they were left or were recognizing their prior faults and trying to course correct, but because they could make theatre out of it. Which is why they had fucking clowns on every night like Jeff Lord and Santorum excusing the inexcusable.
I dont know how accurate this is, but I just saw a report that the ratings were not good. Up compared to a normal weeknight but WAY down compared to recent events like bits of the Jan 06 committee hearings and Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony