On this weekend’s Best of the Left podcast the theme is “Corporate media’s fight for legitimacy in the age of Trump“.
The contrast between the Donald Trump who gave a solo press conference on Thursday and the Donald Trump who spoke to 9,000 of his own supporters in a Floridian airplane hangar on Saturday is quite revealing.
Everyone has their comfort zones and there is no doubt that the President is far more suited to the latter of the two settings outlined above. However, the way he handles his discomfort with the media is quite startling. He brands CNN “Very Fake News”, and the NY Times gets tagged with the moniker “failing” whenever he mentions them.
BBC World Service’s The Inquiry program asked the NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet how a newspaper covers a powerful public figure who repeatedly treats them with such contempt…
As the overall title of the BOTL episode suggests, the media is far from an innocent victim in the wider political context; in fact it could be said that Trump’s march to the White House is in many ways down to all the free coverage he received.
Putting it most bluntly is Farron Cousins of The Ring of Fire…
We like Ring of Fire here at FPP but on this we couldn’t disagree more.
Of course the corporate-controlled media pays more attention to its advertizers than any Progressive worth their salt would like, but we still feel it’s important to keep tabs on what they are saying. So we say don’t switch them off, just make sure when you do watch, you’re switched on to where they’re coming from, so you can keep tabs on what is being fed into the bloodsteam of the media-hungry masses. JLP
First Person Plural 