Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans do not trust women.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

In my day, never was longer.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Fox Is Part of the Reason Trump Still Gets Votes

Fox Is Part of the Reason Trump Still Gets Votes

by | 182 Comments

This post is in: 

Fox

If all you watch is Fox News, you wouldn’t have seen women talking about their abortion experiences at the DNC.  In addition:

[…] Fox News buried a court decision implementing a near-total abortion ban in Arizona; barely covered the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are legally equivalent to children; and almost completely ignored Florida’s implementation of a six-week abortion ban.

You also wouldn’t have seen any of the speeches from disaffected former Republicans:

The DNC speakers included former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who spoke in prime-time before Harris’ Thursday keynote; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan; former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham; Olivia Troye, who served as a homeland security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence; and Mesa, Arizona, Mayor John Giles.

I don’t need to go into their constant cleanup efforts on Trump’s behalf when he calls in or when he speaks.

Look, I’m not going to say that someone voting for Trump is doing so only because Fox feeds them a steady diet of their bullshit.  But Fox is definitely the opiate of the old, and once an older person falls down their rathole, there’s no going back.

Reader Interactions

182Comments

  1. 1.

    Elizabelle

    I do not think Fox News should be aired on US military stations abroad.  It was Channel 1 on an Army base I visited.

    It’s a radicalizing and destabilizing force.  I wish the next SecDef would ban it.

    Billionaire Murdoch family should not be hiding behind the First Amendment on this one.

  2. 2.

    Bill Arnold

    But Fox is definitely the opiate of the old, and once an older person falls down their rathole, there’s no going back.

    I once told my father, in his mid 80s (like 10+ years ago), that if he started watching Fox News, his television would break.
    Not sure he believed me, but I was quite serious. Modern electronic devices are easy to irreparably glitch.
    Fortunately, he was a Democrat, a NYTimes cover-to-cover every-day reader (fond of daily sudoku puzzles; his brain worked well), and a PBS snooze hour watcher. (Regrettably fond of David Brooks.)

  3. 3.

    BR

    @Elizabelle: ​

    Yeah, I’ve wondered why that’s allowed. I would think that partisan media is against some basic tenets of the military, if not actual policies.

  5. 5.

    danielx

    I don’t need to go into their constant cleanup efforts on Trump’s behalf when he calls in or when he speaks.

    Clean up behind the lectern, and try to make it before anybody notices!

    But even for Fox  he’s not the new shining hope any more, especially when their efforts on his behalf cost them $787 million….and counting.

  6. 6.

    CaseyL

    @Elizabelle: 

    I agree, Fox has no place on our military bases – or any other Federal office – but the uproar if the Biden Administration banished it would be heard as far away as Alpha Centauri.

    And, of course, the MSM would join in the uproar on Fox’s behalf.

  7. 7.

    BR

    @CaseyL:

    Seems like there’d be some neutral-ish policy under which getting rid of Fox could be mandated. Like a requirement that any channel that is shown on base has to provide at least 6 hours a day of unedited time showing policymaking. That would limit it to CSPAN.

  8. 8.

    danielx

    @hells littlest angel: ​
     This is true. Junkies are actually pretty peaceable and even functional as long as they get their shit. Tweakers are usually irascible and after a three day binge are likely to shoot at cars and such under the impression they are fast moving monsters.

  9. 9.

    A Ghost to Most

    They watch Fox because the cult tells them to. The cult predates Fox by decades. Fix the disease, not the symptoms.

  10. 10.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Fox doesn’t just leave things out.  They create a whole alternate fantasy world.  I haven’t watched any lately, but I remember during the Mueller investigations their reports that Hillary would be arrested any day now because of what the investigation was turning up.

  11. 11.

    Betty

    My sister’s brother-in-law is a Fox watcher so she gets to hear that Kamala is too dumb to be President. All efforts at correcting that mis-impression have proved futile.

  12. 12.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Betty: ​My sister’s brother-in-law is a Fox watcher so she gets to hear that Kamala is too dumb to be President.

     This reminded me of a comment by Nobel-Prize-winning author Toni Morrison:

    “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. …. There will always be one more thing.”

  15. 15.

    Jeffro

    Fox is there to keep the GOP’s “floor” at 40%.

    Fox is there to ensure that the entire right-wing ecosystem has consistent messaging, every hour of every day.

    Fox is there so that Republicans almost never hear bad news about the party or its candidates, or messages that might cause them to think

    ETA: forgot one…Fox is there to sound that Pavlovian “Breaking News” chime at least once an hour, to keep its viewers in a steady state of near-panic.

  16. 16.

    tam1MI

    @CaseyL:

    I agree, Fox has no place on our military bases – or any other Federal office – but the uproar if the Biden Administration banished it would be heard as far away as Alpha Centauri.

    And, of course, the MSM would join in the uproar on Fox’s behalf.

    Biden should go ahead and do it anyway.  It’s not like he has to worry about being re-elected.

  17. 17.

    Chet Murthy

    @tam1MI: “It’s not like he has to worry about being re-elected.”

    I’m assuming (and  hoping) Biden will pardon Hunter on his way out the door.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    @tam1MI: he has to worry about Harris being elected. Dumb to do something to energize our adversaries.

     

     

    @Chet Murthy: he should do it if Trump wins because Trump will have Hunter killed in prison.

  20. 20.

    Suzanne

    @zhena gogolia:
    Fox’s median age of viewership is 68.

    The decline in younger consumers using pay TV has cut into one of the strengths of CNN, which has long boasted an audience with the lowest median age in cable news. CNN’s median age was 67 this year, up from 60 in 2017.

    That figure is still lower than the median age of the Fox News (68) and MSNBC (71) audiences. But CNN long benefited from being the destination for younger viewers who were not habitual cable news viewers. They could be counted on to tune in during major breaking news events. Not so much anymore.

     
    ETA: The more salient trend is that younger viewers are not really watching TV news at all.

  22. 22.

    Suzanne

    @Baud: SuzMom is an old liberal and she loves MSNBC. The only time I see even a minute of it is if I walk into her room while she’s watching it. My MIL also loves it.

  24. 24.

    SpaceUnit

    My parents were life-long Republicans who watched Fox News pretty much every day.  They switched parties in their 70’s and voted for Obama.

  26. 26.

    karen marie

    I saw a clip of sad Eric Bolling complaining about Fox’s numbers being down, that MSNBC beat Fox! during, I guess, the conventions.  But he was especially upset because Newsmax has almost no viewers.  It was pretty funny.

  27. 27.

    Dangerman

    FOX is part of the problem. Rasmussen (sp?) is on the list. He has TCFG up 5. Anyone who buys he’s up 5 should get a 5150.

    ETA: Even TCFG doesn’t buy tthat bullshit. He has real internals. My guess is they seriously suck. Golf ball and 10 feet of surgical tubing suck.

  28. 28.

    Suzanne

    @BR: I bet “mainstream media” sources like the NYT and WaPo aren’t much different.

    Of course, keep in mind that the country is old. The median voter this year is my age — 44. That’s the oldest it has ever been.

  29. 29.

    BR

    Apparently Telegram’s founder was just arrested in France. Given that it’s heavily used in Russia and also by lots of far right groups, I wonder what the ripple effects might be.

  31. 31.

    Suzanne

    @Baud: I don’t watch cable at all anymore.

    The younger crew is on YouTube channels and social media and podcasts. And by “younger”, that’s probably most Americans under 50 or so.

  32. 32.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, …

    Kyle Griffin
    @kylegriffin1

    2h

    A county judge has temporarily put on hold Ohio’s 24-hour waiting law for abortions. After Ohioans approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion in 2023, attorneys sued to block state policies that made it harder to get an abortion. The judge said the amendment’s language was “clear and unambiguous” about reproductive rights protections. The ACLU says it will push forward to make the temporary injunction permanent.
     
    Aug 24, 2024 · 7:10 PM UTC

    Good, good.

    (via https://mastodon.social/@GottaLaff )

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    Jinchi

    Fox is definitely the opiate of the old, and once an older person falls down their rathole, there’s no going back.

    I’ve found switching on the Child Lock, specifically for Fox, is a great way to detoxify the atmosphere during family visits. It’s surprisingly easy to convince people that we just don’t get the channel in California.

  36. 36.

    cain

    @Elizabelle:

    So far our institutions have failed us in this regard. Fox is literally a national security threat but right wing rhetoric always seems to be ignored but 3 letter agencies sure do like to spy on leftists.

    The fact that the dept of defense have done nothing against Elon is telling.

  38. 38.

    Jinchi

    @Chet Murthy: I’m assuming (and hoping) Biden will pardon Hunter on his way out the door.

    I’d be surprised if he does, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Kamala did after he left office.

  39. 39.

    Chet Murthy

    @Suzanne:I’m sure you saw the same reports I did, that this time around the olds are trending for Biden (with speculation that COVID is what convinced them) ?  And reports asking if they’ll stick around for Harris ?

  40. 40.

    cain

    @CaseyL:

    I think Harris administration should definitely make a stand on this. If the MSM complains just refer them to Congress if they got a problem.

    If they sue, prosecutor Kamala would be happy litigate fox news being a news agency or not. Let them bring it to court and we can debate it there. Under oath.

  41. 41.

    Suzanne

    @Baud: Well, I will note that when we talk about old people and white people, we’re often talking about the same people. The Boomer generation is something like 75-80% white, whereas Millennials are about 50% white.

    White men were a bigger demographic for Trump than white women.

  42. 42.

    Baud

    @Suzanne:

    I think we can all agree that white men are the worst. They’re the base of that party.

    ETA: We’re all hoping Coach can bring some of them back from the abyss.

  43. 43.

    Suzanne

    @Chet Murthy: I haven’t seen that the olds were going for Biden over Trump, that would be interesting if that were so.

    What I did see was that Biden was maintaining the older white voters from his 2020 coalition in 2024, but he was eroding support from younger voters, Black, and Latino voters (again, there’s a lot more Black and Latino voters in that “younger voters” cohort than there is in the older cohorts).

  44. 44.

    cain

    @Suzanne:

    They (right wing old white people) hate seeing the diversity. They hate that they don’t have control over society and fox strokes their ego and grievance.

    They are destroying themselves while doing it.

  45. 45.

    ArchTeryx

    @Baud: Sadly, to drill down further, it’s uneducated and rural (but I repeat myself) white men that are the base of the Republican party. The higher the ed level, the more votes they lose. There’s a reason they want to trash the entire public school system and are constantly going after colleges.

  47. 47.

    Gin & Tonic

    @BR: Telegram is widely used by groups across the political spectrum in both russia and Ukraine (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.) There’s a lot of really reprehensible content, but also a lot of just plain information. But I doubt Durov’s arrest will mean much for day-to-day operation.

  48. 48.

    ArchTeryx

    @Baud: I think that’s the key metric for both white men and white women – education level. For whatever reason (and this happened to me too) going to college tends to make people less bigoted and less apt to listen to the siren song of the fascist party.

    For Hispanics I think it’s similar as well, but far more uneducated Hispanic folks than uneducated white people vote D still.

  49. 49.

    Anoniminous

    @Suzanne: 

    Newsweek is saying Trump’s white working class support has “shrunk significantly.”  Not sure I buy it.  Something to keep an eye on tho.

  51. 51.

    Suzanne

    @cain: The age stats from 2020 are interesting. The 65-and-up cohort went for Trump with the biggest point spread, and then it declined in almost perfect linear fashion. The 18-29 cohort went for Biden 60/36.

    This is part of why I was more inclined away from Biden than some others here. There’s a lot of evidence that voting patterns and party identity are set early, and it seems to me to be wise to make sure our candidates appeal to the younger set so they grow into reliable Dem voters.

  52. 52.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Jeffro:

    Fox is there to keep the GOP’s “floor” at 40%.

    This.  We talk about the Crazification Factor but yeah, Faux “News” essentially adds 13% to that.  I think that’s heavily influenced by 13% unrepentant racists as well.

  53. 53.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Baud:

    @tam1MI: he has to worry about Harris being elected.

    What part of “on his way out the door” – which obviously means sometime after the election is settled and prior to noon on 1/20/25 – are you having trouble wrapping your head around?

    And you are widely regarded as the brains of this blog??? Gesummaria.

  54. 54.

    Suzanne

    @ArchTeryx: White people who went to college vote so differently than white people who didn’t go to college that I honestly think they’re two separate tribes at this point.

  55. 55.

    wvng

    @BR: “I would think that partisan media is against some basic tenets of the military” I would think that too, but we would both be wrong. Right wing media of all types is played all over military sites. Limbaugh was there for his entire run, even as he was trashing Democratic Commanders-in-Chief constantly.

  57. 57.

    Jay

    Heather Burgundy 🇺🇦🇯🇵
    @HeatherBurgundy
    10h
    Elon Musk satisfied the demands and provided a list of shareholders of “X Holding Corp”, who helped the billionaire buy Twitter.
    Among them are Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich.

    Petr Aven is a Russian billionaire, founder of Alfa Group, one of the main wallets for Putin. Aven is one of Putin’s oldest friends. Putin would be in prison instead of becoming president without him. Aven covered for Vladimir Putin in 1992, when he organized an illegal trade in export licenses; he was also present at a meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022, in the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. He did not express any protest against “SVO” and supported Putin. By the way, he, together with Fridman, is trying to lift sanctions from himself, just yesterday he received another refusal in this matter.
    In the purchase of Twitter he is represented by the company “8VC Opportunities Fund II, LP”, where his son Denis works.

    Vadim Moshkovich is a sanctioned Russian agricultural billionaire who was a member of the “Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation.” In other words, he was officially part of Putin’s inner circle. Moshkovich owns Russia’s largest agricultural holding, Rusagro. Naturally, he was also present at the meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022, and, like Aven, did not express any protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
    In the purchase of Twitter he is represented by the company “8VC Opportunities Fund II, LP”, where his son Jack (Eugene) works.

    Knowing all this, we now understand Elon Musk’s bias. Everyone was wondering how it was possible that Twitter shares (X) were falling, advertisers were breaking contracts, and no one was doing anything. This was direct damage to investors. But everyone failed to take into account the fact that investors needed a platform to promote their narratives, such as: support for Putin and Russia; lobbying for freezing the war in Ukraine; removing the Ukrainian agenda from the top news etc.

    It is now clear that all the changes on Twitter that are ruining this wonderful platform are a result of Elon Musk’s collaboration with people like Moshkovich and Aven.

    https://nitter.poast.org/HeatherBurgundy/status/1827303361106108789#m

  60. 60.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Jay:

    It is now clear that all the changes on Twitter that are ruining this wonderful platform are a result of Elon Musk’s collaboration with people like Moshkovich and Aven.

    That is not clear to me at all.  They are just helping Musk do what he already wanted to do.  They might be the reason he’s anti-Ukraine, but not the other stuff.

    Still, important to know that Musk is buddy-buddy and in business with sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

  62. 62.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Dangerman: Rasmussen (sp?) is on the list. He has TCFG up 5.

    Crassmussen is a serial liar and an unethical “survey researcher” who tortures his data to produce whatever results are dictated by the oligarchy he whores for. (FTR there are all sorts of ways to do that and still stay out of jail.) Too bad there’s no legal way to rendition his mendacious arse to some backward country that would torture him for a couple of decades.

  65. 65.

    Chet Murthy

    @Uncle Cosmo: Is this the original Rasmussen polling company, or Rasmussen’s new polling company?  The original was already pretty horrific (due to the founder being a complete shit), but then it got so bad that the eponymous founder quit and founded a new one ?  Or something like  that?

  67. 67.

    tam1MI

    @Uncle Cosmo:What part of “on his way out the door” – which obviously means sometime after the election is settled and prior to noon on 1/20/25 – are you having trouble wrapping your head around?

    What you quoted was a reply to my statement, not my actual statement.  I actually agree with you on this.  :)

  68. 68.

    chemiclord

    Fox News, like Rush Limbaugh, and the John Birch Society before that, thrive by telling the deplorable people what they want to hear.

    If it wasn’t Fox, it’d be NewsMax or OAN or whatever.

  69. 69.

    TheOtherHank

    My dad died almost a year ago from complications of alcoholism (ie, his liver gave out). When people expressed condolences, if I was in a feisty mood, I’d reply with, “Thank you. He died doing what he loved, watching Fox news and drinking bourbon.”
    I think 9/11 and then Obama drove him completely over the edge. I don’t think it helped that once when we were discussing Obama he called him a “fascist communist” and I laughed at him and said he should pick one or the other.​

  74. 74.

    AM in NC

    @Elizabelle: 1000% this.  It is a LYING propaganda machine that has no business being broadcast to our military.

    After the settlement over Dominion, and after FOX went to court to expressly be deemed an entertainment channel, there was a legal reason for our government to stop having ANYTHING to do with FOX. Including in the White House Press Room.

    We won’t have “reporters” from Entertainment Tonight in the press room, it should be the same with FOX “News”.

  75. 75.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Baud: Where do you see those words in Comment 16?​

    The same place Chet Murthy saw them when he quoted them in comment #17, Before someone edited them out. I hope it was the original poster and not one of your FP buddies covering up the tracks.

  76. 76.

    CaseyL

    O/T mini-rant: I keep seeing this in local news stories. When someone dies, or a locally-owned business closes, the Seattle Times continuously calls that person or business “beloved.”

    A beloved coffee house is closing… A beloved dog-walker was murdered….A beloved cyclist died in a hit-and-run…A beloved restaurant is closing after 20 years…

    What is this? Why is this? Is it pure schmaltz, jerking at our feels so we’re sure to click on the news story? Does the family or soon-to-be-unemployed workers want their loss “personalized”?

    It’s just weird, because at some point the reporters or editors will leave out the word “beloved” and the underlying message will be “So and So has been killed and no one particularly cares.” And I’m not sure that’s a good message, either!

  79. 79.

    Citizen Alan

    @ArchTeryx: Personally, I think it’s dormitories. And the more diverse environment in general, but especially dormitories. The first friends I ever made in my life who were black or non-christian or gay or who were women who wanted more out of life than to get married and have babies were all people I met in college either in the dorms or through coed environments. It is not a coincidence that, of the people who DO get college degrees but also remain very conservative, most of them either went to places like liberty university or else were filtered into the incredibly homogenized fraternity/sorority system. It is impossible to remain bigoted towards a class of people if you have to spend a lot of social time around members of that class and realize that all the things your family members told you about them growing up were all bullshit.

    I realized this when I was trying to figure out how my RWNJ sister became a RWNJ despite having a master’s degree and retiring after thirty years as a teacher. And I suddenly realized that she never lived on campus anywhere and cobbled together her Bachelor’s degree from time spent at several different colleges and junior colleges, whereas I went to Ole Miss for 4 years and lived on campus for the first three (and in an apartment complex that was mostly college kids as a senior).

    And then she came back to teach for thirty years at the same little hicktown, we grew up in without ever living for any appreciable length of time outside of the county in which we were born. Despite her education, she never had the experience of interacting with people who came from different backgrounds than her, let alone developing friendships with such people, and, at age 63, she has no such friendships today and very little empathy for people who live in different circumstances than her.

  81. 81.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Splitting Image: I’m a soon to be 69 year old white dude and my wife and I go to church almost every Sunday and we even sing in the choir.

    On the other hand it’s a Unitarian Universalist church- no opiate there. ;)

  84. 84.

    Citizen Alan

    @Frankensteinbeck: Every American billionaire has more in common with billionaires in Russia and China than they do with anyone in america who is not in their tax bracket. It’s why I want to tax them out of existence. I consider anyone whose wealth is equivalent to the GDP of a small nation and who has an absolute constitutional right to interfere in our elections and spread propaganda to be an existential threat to the survival of our democracy.

  86. 86.

    Jay

    @Citizen Alan:

    Just make it a law that when someone reaches their first billion dollars, (in every form), they get an awards ceremony, a trophy that says. “Congratulations, you won Capitalism!” and then every penny over that $1 Billion sum is regularly seized by the Federal Government and put in the general funds.

  87. 87.

    BR

    @Gin & Tonic: ​

    Rumors that French Intelligence has gotten access to some Telegram data already, though who knows what. Telegram’s encryption has always been second rate, so I can’t imagine that they need the founder in custody to crack it, but maybe it’s easier.

  88. 88.

    Jeffro

    @Jay:Just make it a law that when someone reaches their first billion dollars, (in every form), they get an awards ceremony, a trophy that says. “Congratulations, you won Capitalism!”

    I’m good with reducing that benchmark by a factor of 10 or 20, but yeah.

  92. 92.

    Jay

    @BR:

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Rumours abound.

    We don’t know the contents of the arrest warrant,

    they range from having to testify in an investigation into Telegram’s non-moderation violating EU laws,

    to acting as a co-conspirator in every crime, act of terrorism, etc conducted via Telegram for refusing to “identify” the holders of certain Telegram accounts.

  96. 96.

    BR

    @rikyrah: ​

    I think I would add “Trump didn’t write Project 2025 (because he doesn’t write anything) but it was written for him by his people.”

  97. 97.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    I remember being at a diner in Fairbanks, AK last year. They had Newsmax on their TVs and it was some crazy shit to hear – especially over lunch.

    Given the diner’s lack of news reality, I was definitely concerned that I would get food poisoning.

  99. 99.

    different-church-lady

    Fox is unquestionably one of the top three reasons Trump might slime his way back into the Oval Office.

  101. 101.

    Bill Arnold

    @tam1MI:
    One small poll, 801 registered voters; not much predictive value. Best to stick to watching polling averages, though recency is important.

  102. 102.

    Shalimar

    @rikyrah: No one has to go to Project 2025.  Trump’s website has a policy section that is in most ways a simplified version of Project 2025 and on a few issues is actually worse.

  104. 104.

    lamh47

    ‘Sup. BJ.

    Spent the past 4 days in DFW for a work retreat (2 days work, 2 days free)  Spent time with my baby sister and her family.  It was my niece Layla’s 8th birthday Friday. So I hang out with my sister and the babies! Today I’m my flight now, finally heading home to SF!

     

    Layla 1yr old vs 8 yrs old

  105. 105.

    Elizabelle

    @AM in NC:  Good comment.  Agree about not having them in the Press Room either.  Unless it’s Entertainment Companies’ Day.

  106. 106.

    Starfish

    @lamh47: Is Zoe Layla’s sister? I think you posted a photo once that cracked me up so much that I kept it forever. Those children have such big eyes.

  107. 107.

    dmsilev

    I hope someone reads this Post article to Trump, it’ll make him mad:

    Trump allies try to energize him as he struggles to adapt to Harris
    The Republican nominee has fixated on Biden’s withdrawal: “It feels like he’s lost his mojo.”

    Donald Trump looked cheerful playing golf at his New Jersey club one day earlier this month, then appeared bored in an afternoon news conference and dour during a reception with megadonor Miriam Adelson. He publicly mused about staying home during the Democratic National Convention, letting Vice President Kamala Harris hold the spotlight unchallenged.

    Several former aides who have known Trump for years said he always preferred to keep a lighter schedule in August, when his family visited Bedminster and he usually golfed almost every day.

    But aides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.

    “The stakes for Trump this election are arguably the highest they’ve ever been. His criminal cases don’t go away if he loses. Yet he seems to be phoning it in, running a remarkably low-energy, undisciplined campaign,” saidAlyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House spokeswoman who quit after Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “From spending days off the campaign trail golfing to coming up with frankly weak nicknames like ‘Kamabala,’ it feels like he’s lost his mojo.”

    Trump’s campaign loggedmentions of his name during the Democratic convention, hoping to depict the Democratic Party as less focused on policy and more on being obsessed with him. Across hundreds of name-drops, DNC convention speakers described Trump as a narcissist, a criminal, a charlatan, a race-baiter and more in searing speeches suggesting he remains the unifying target of the Democratic Party.

    Most of his allies offered little defense of his character. There was no rapid response operation to respond to Democratic criticism that he inspired a riot at the U.S. Capitol, paid hush money to an adult film actress or was found liable for sexual abuse. Instead, surrogates and aides attacked Harris and Walz for not addressing Republican policy priorities and made a website portraying Harris’s policy record in a negative light.

    I mean, that Democratic criticism was and is accurate, which might put a crimp in things.

  108. 108.

    wjca

    @Chet Murthy: I’m assuming (and  hoping) Biden will pardon Hunter on his way out the door.

    I expect that Biden is astute enough to just commute his sentence to “time served.”

  112. 112.

    BR

    @Betty:

    I’ve heard of folks being successful in breaking through by challenging someone their family to go without Fox for a month. “If you’re such a tough guy who has your own opinions, then prove it by not watching any Fox News, right wing radio or videos for a month.”

  113. 113.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Jay: Oh nooooooo, what will happen when you remove the incentive of billionaires to get even richer? Atlas might shrug at us and we won’t get any Rearden Metal!

  114. 114.

    Jeffro

    @dmsilev: trump can’t get past his grievances at (what he perceived as/was led to believe would be) an easy victory and REVENGE over Joe Biden being snatched away from him.

    (especially by…Joe Biden’s own actions, LOL!  leaving trump to face…a Black woman! LOLOL)

    and now he’s just stuck, stuck, stuck

    he can’t avoid the constant creeping thoughts of jail time and perhaps worse for him, the inability to exact REVENGE for his humiliating loss in 2020 and many indictments since then

  121. 121.

    zhena gogolia

    I tried to tell @lamh47 that her niece is so cute, but the blog won’t let me.

    ETA: Now it did.

  122. 122.

    BR

    @Jeffro: ​

    Do they engage with it or tune it out?

    I’m told that some of my die-hard GOP/Trumper relatives (who are very old, and who I don’t talk with myself) have turned on him recently about the “dictator on day one” stuff. I was floored, because I always thought that was obvious, but apparently that was the red line for them.

  123. 123.

    Jeffro

    @schrodingers_cat:some people like to pretend that all Trump voters are unlettered yokels.

    yup…when in fact, just like the J6 rioters, most of them are quite comfortable, older, employed…and crazy.

    they just happen to come from counties where growth in the non-white population has grown quickly.  Apparently this causes “economic anxiety”

  124. 124.

    SW

    Lots of mainstream journos make an equivalence between Fox and MSNBC.  That misses the point.  Yes they are both clearly partisan.  But MSNBC doesn’t just make shit up out of whole cloth the way Fox does.

  129. 129.

    Jackie

    @dmsilev: If TCFG is mailing it in… he’s packing to go to Argentina? He has his passport – as of now.

    His only reason for  running for re-election is to keep his ass out of prison.

    I don’t think he’s giving up, but for the moment he’s not trying to win. We’ll have a better idea of his plans after the Sept 10th debate.

  130. 130.

    sdhays

    @Starfish: Yeah, he was actually reading words off signs before his third birthday. Took us by surprise.

    Thanks for the link. We have a few of those series, although I don’t think we’ve read that particular one.

  131. 131.

    Jeffro

    @BR: I don’t really have any data on that (and the ‘N’ would be pretty small anyways)

    When I post anti-trump (and especially, anti-Fox) stuff, it’s in the hopes that 1) it will reinforce the idea that they are in a disinfo bubble, and might want to think about that, or that 2) it will remind them that they are in fact backing the wrong, corrupt, un-American candidate and will regret it.

    (Half the time, I just note how great it is to live my inclusive, progressive, all-American, forward-facing values and not have to make excuses for my…deplorable…candidates and the things they say and do.  =)

    Given all the stress of the past 9 years, causing them some cognitive dissonance, however fleeting, seems to be the least I owe them can do.

  132. 132.

    Suzanne

    @Starfish:

    I thought that the television viewing population in general is old.

    It is.

    According to the most recent data, U.S. viewers aged 15 years and older spent on average almost three hours watching TV per day in 2023. Adults aged 65 and above spent the most time watching television at over four hours, whilst 15 to 19-year-olds watched TV for less than two hours each day.

  133. 133.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: Trump’s campaign certainly has had setbacks over the last month. If Trump was a resiliant, tough person he would shake it off and get to work.

    But Trump talks too tough to be a tough person. He’s brittle, and he’s lazy.

  134. 134.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Jackie:

    I don’t think he’s giving up, but for the moment he’s not trying to win.

    I don’t think he knows how.  The press was campaigning against Biden for him, and Trump just had to coast.  Being handed the world on a silver platter with minimal effort has been his life.  Having that suddenly stop must be a seriously rude awakening.

  136. 136.

    Jeffro

    @SW:MSNBC doesn’t just make shit up out of whole cloth the way Fox does.

    true

    and perhaps more importantly, doesn’t just ‘disappear’ bad news for Democratic candidates and causes the way that Fox does for GOP ones.

    I remember back in 2017 when the Dems won the governorships in both VA and NJ.  All eyes were on the races – they were supposed to be R validation for trump’s 2016 “win”.  Fox’s reporting on both big D wins?  6 seconds.

  138. 138.

    Suzanne

    @Jeffro: Fox represents the cohort of Republicans who need to feel convinced they are winning and that they have a numerical advantage. The right-wing Catholic integralists are possibly even scarier, because they know they’re a small minority and they still think they should rule.

    JD Vance comes from this cohort and they are terrifying.

  139. 139.

    tam1MI

    @Suzanne:

    It is.

    According to the most recent data, U.S. viewers aged 15 years and older spent on average almost three hours watching TV per day in 2023. Adults aged 65 and above spent the most time watching television at over four hours, whilst 15 to 19-year-olds watched TV for less than two hours each day.

    That kind of shocks me because it’s not too far off from how much television 15-19 year olds/15 and older watched “back in my day”.  We could only get in 2-3 hours of television because we had to go to school the next day (and weekends of course were for fun, not TV).  Similarly, 65 year olds and up watching more television makes more sense because most of them are retired and have more time on their hands to watch TV.

  140. 140.

    Suzanne

    @tam1MI: This matches my observations, too. My mom watches a ton of TV, my kids watch much less. They spend much more time on YouTube.

  143. 143.

    Starfish

    @tam1MI: The pediatricians recommend under two hours of screen time, and we don’t count all the time these kids spend on YouTube and video games.

  145. 145.

    Soprano2

    @Citizen Alan: This is true. The first Jewish person I ever knew lived on my floor my first year in college. She was the first person I knew who had gone to Europe. I still wonder how her life is now. I’m so glad I lived on campus, college is a very different experience for those who don’t.

  146. 146.

    brantl

    @A Ghost to Most:  That’s exactly wrong. Fox is in the zombie-making business, their bullshit facts are making more and more of them and driving their moderates to be more extreme.

  149. 149.

    schrodingers_cat

    You don’t have to watch Fox to get disinformation. There is plenty of disinformation on YouTube and Tiktok or any social platform. You don’t have to be old and a Fox News watcher to be uninformed or misinformed.

  151. 151.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Jackie: I have seen plenty of ahistoric claptrap from young people about events I have actually lived through. Its not a uniquely American phenomena either

    I personally think that the NYT is the most dangerous news organization of them all. It peddles RW talking points but it has the patina of being prestigious. The rest of the MSM follows whatever they do. And far too many people are under the impression that NYT is liberal.

    Fox News and their agenda is not a secret.

  152. 152.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Suzanne: Not trying to be argumentative here, but to you (or to anyone) – what is the qualitative difference between watching two hours of “TV” and watching two hours of YouTube?

  153. 153.

    Chet Murthy

    @Gin & Tonic: heh, yes, I was wondering  the same myself.  From everything I’ve read, kids these days don’t watch teevee, but they spend massive amounts of time staring at screens nevertheless.  To the point that it’s a real problem for education, socialization, physical activity, and even nearsightedness.

    I’m not saying my generation was better: just that things haven’t improved.

    Now that said, there -is- a difference between watching Fox News all day, and watching Youtube: instead of Roger Ailes’ heir curating the news, you have some algorithm doing the curation based on inputs we have no clue about.  Maybe that’s better, maybe it’s not.

  155. 155.

    Geminid

    @schrodingers_cat: There certainly is a fixation on the White working class and (I suppose) petit Bourgeoisie., especially since they are a declining demographic.

    I have a convoluted theory! White working class voters are an “out group,” and the diners where they are so often found are culturally remote from reporters snd editors, and their readers as well. Sometimes the stories they put out remind me of National Geographic articles.

    The reporters could always seek out Starbucks shops instead of diners. They’re easy enough to find, especislly in the suburban areas that are now political battlegrounds. They’d find a different crowd for sure.

    I used to visit the Starbucks south of Waynesboro Virginia, just off of I-64. That crowd was middle- and upper-middle class; professionals, successful small business owners and comfortable retirees. That were a well dressed crowd; it was like looking at an L.L. Bean catolog with some Orvis thrown in. These folks were not out-group, but were instead in-group like reporters, editors and their readers.

    It was also a Republican crowd. I bet they voted 4-1 or better for Foungkin’ Youngkin. He’s their ideal politician.

    A reporter interviewing these people would find many of the reactionary sentiments they find in diners, and some worse. But then they would have to tell on their own, and they might even share those sentiments themselves.

  157. 157.

    Suzanne

    @Gin & Tonic: No difference at all in the amount of brain rot. ;) Big difference in the kind of content, though. Gone are the days when everyone got news from the same sources….. the same three networks, reporting basically the same stuff. That created a monoculture, a shared reality. The fragmentation of what media people consume means that we have much less of a common point of reference with others.

  160. 160.

    Princess

    @schrodingers_cat: I agree. We should be way more concerned about what has happened to the NYT. Losing an independent press is as bad in its way as losing scotus. We’re fighting a rearguard action here. I think Harris is fully aware of that at least.

  161. 161.

    Suzanne

    @Geminid: The fixation on “white working class” voters in diners is an example of what I mentioned above. Many of the white people who went to college and are in that middle-class socioeconomic sphere genuinely don’t know large numbers of white people who didn’t go to college and don’t have PMC jobs. They eat different food, have different religious practices, go to different schools, watch different stuff, spend time differently, have different conceptions of “the good life”. They might have one MAGA uncle they see on holidays, but the NYT reporters who write those Ohio diner stories genuinely don’t consort with people outside their class cohort. Like I said above, their behaviors are so different from one another that they aren’t really a coherent tribe anymore. So they write all that dreck with the vague tone that they’re observing a newly discovered species because, well, they kind of are.

  162. 162.

    tam1MI

    @Starfish: The pediatricians recommend under two hours of screen time, and we don’t count all the time these kids spend on YouTube and video games.

    I spend a crapton of time on YouTube, and I am closer to 65 than 15, LOl!

    You have to very carefully curate your feed on YouTube, however.  Click on one wrong video even on accident and all of a sudden your home screen is getting shitted up with a bunch of right wing ranters.

  163. 163.

    Suzanne

    @Gin & Tonic: Sure, but it’s an ongoing pattern. The media landscape gets more fragmented all the time. It’s a change of degree, not of kind.

    So anyway, the youth aren’t watching cable news, they’re not reading the NYT. They’re watching and listening to all kinds of stuff, and some of it’s probably fine and some of it is terrible and full of lies, and so there is a significant generation gap.

  164. 164.

    Timill

    @tam1MI: Applies to anything. I made an incautious selection, and now my feed is full of diesel locomotives doing cold starts, Wagner overtures, and Albert Hammond…

  165. 165.

    Geminid

    @Chet Murthy: I have a 71 year-old friend who gets all his political news off of YouTube. It’s very hit-and-miss. We were texting a few days after Harris released her shortlist of VP candidates and when I said that Walz could be the one, he answered “Who’s that?”

    I’ll probably give him some shit about this sometime, but not until after the election because he’s wound up really tight right now. He’ll stay that way the next ten weeks.

  166. 166.

    Suzanne

    @tam1MI: I am suspicious AF about the algorithms on social media that push content at us. I try to remind myself that those algorithms are designed to create a very individual, personalized user experience. And that it creates this impression that others are seeing the same stuff I am, that we have something in common. But we don’t. It creates parallel universes.

  167. 167.

    Chet Murthy

    @Suzanne: And well you should be.  There have been numerous studies of how biased those algorithms appear to be, towards pushing right-wing and misogynist content to viewers.

  168. 168.

    KatKapCC

    @Betty:

    My sister’s brother-in-law is a Fox watcher so she gets to hear that Kamala is too dumb to be President.

    I wish that anyone who says that could be made to go up against her in an IQ test contest. It’s not that I think she’s a genius, but she’s absolutely more intelligent than anyone who could believe that garbage.

  169. 169.

    Chet Murthy

    @KatKapCC: There’s a thing that I have wished-for since ….. it happened.  You know that “person woman man camera tv” thing?  I’ve wished for an ad where a Dem politician is speaking to the press, and then the camera switches, so it’s on the press, and the Dem pol proceeds to point out the “person, woman, man, camera, and TV” (with helpful red circles around them) and then the camera goes back to the pol, saying something like

    “He’s an idiot.  He didn’t pass that test, he didn’t even remember the five things long enough to get to his damn press conference.  You were all bamboozled.”

    It’d be even better if it weren’t an ad, but an actual press conference.

  170. 170.

    Suzanne

    @Chet Murthy: What freaks me out is even more basic than that. There is simply so much content out there now. I remember reading a stat (who knows if it is true or how this would be measured)….. but that the average person living in 1900 would see something like ten images a year. But, due to the nature of things like that being fairly rare, everybody else saw the same images. And even when I was a kid — and I am old but half of voters are older than me! — most people saw the same stuff! They got their news from the same places, watched a lot of the same shows. Swimming in the same water to that degree meant that we had more of a shared frame of reference. Even if we didn’t have the same opinions, we had more of the same basic facts in common. And every year, there’s just more and more out there (both good and bad), there’s fewer barriers to entry for content creators, things move faster and we just have less of a shared experience of the world. That creates the conditions for a lot of polarization and distrust and terrible antisocial behavior.

    Like, all that shit about ivermectin being a Covid cure. None of that was pushed in “traditional media”. But people who live in the fever swamps of the internet found it and it flew around.

  172. 172.

    Chet Murthy

    @Suzanne: There’s a question that I’ve been wondering about, that is related to your concern.

    In this age of media fragmentation and the resurgence of The Big Lie, how can truth prevail?

    I really don’t know the answer to the question.

  175. 175.

    Aussie Sheila

    Agree totally with s_c re the danger of the nyt.

    National print news media acts as the ‘assignment’ editor for much TV, cable and local news outlets. That’s how it works here on Oz.
    It’s not so much the content as such, although that’s often important, it’s the ‘sifting’ of what’s ‘news’ and what’s not that is so insidious, plus the ‘tone’ that is also adopted across platforms.

  176. 176.

    Darkrose

    @lamh47: OMG! I remember you posting when she was born–can’t believe she’s already 8! What a sweetie! Glad you got to spend some time with family.

  177. 177.

    Suzanne

    @Chet Murthy:

    In this age of media fragmentation and the resurgence of The Big Lie, how can truth prevail? 

    I genuinely have no idea.

    Like all social changes, it occurred because problems existed. And I am always wary of idealizing something in the past.

    One suggestion I heard on a podcast was about how to keep young boys away from Andrew Tate-esque content. The person suggested that people should talk about what they’re watching and reading with young people in their lives, and watch/read some of the content they’re consuming, in order to be able to talk to them about it and lead them to something better.

  178. 178.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Suzanne: Around 1980, a number of things came together to take out the influence of the “Big Three” news operations.  First, Reagan killed a lot of broadcast regulations that had kept news organizations focused on news, not on ratings.  Infotainment was born.  Cable opened up a lot of new competition for the big three.  The icons of broadcast news were retiring or dying off.  This was all hunky dory for the Rethugs, who hated the “gatekeepers” who could not be bought and actually presented news.

  179. 179.

    frog

    @Betty:

    My sister’s brother-in-law is a Fox watcher so she gets to hear that Kamala is too dumb to be President.

    She is smart enough to know that drinking (or mainlining) bleach will not cure COVID.

  180. 180.

    Suzanne

    @Villago Delenda Est: Agree. But it’s not just news per se. It’s almost every kind of media consumed. There’s many more niches and subcultures. It makes us almost foreign to each other. I read that even the biggest hits today (movies, TV, books, songs, whatever) get a much smaller percentage of the overall population than they used to. Probably the only monocultural thing left is the Super Bowl, and I bet that’s on the wane.

  181. 181.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Chet Murthy: I have no idea, but I don’t think it matters. It’s not like he doesn’t know how to do competent survey research – one reason his “results” tend to revert toward reality as an election approaches is to preserve his credibility so he gets work when there’s no election impending. Which only makes the dishonesty of his sadistics more reprehensible. If statisticians had courts that could enforce the death penalty he’d’ve been taken behind the barn and shot a long time ago,

  182. 182.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @tam1MI: ​What you quoted was a reply to my statement, not my actual statement.

    That;s strange, since Chet Murthy’s post at #17 appears to directly quote yours right above it. Did you by chance edit that phrase out of your post in the very few minutes between Chet’s quote and the close of the edit window? That’s the only way Baud wouldn;t have seen that phrase. But why would you have done that, if you agree with my point? ‘Tis a quandary.

Comments are closed.