nothing annoys me more than the notion of an "expectations game." there is no rule that says journalists must evaluate political events on the basis of expectations set by party apparatchiks. edition.cnn.com/2024/06/26/p...
The curve they get Trump on crimes, gaffes, bizarre statements that no other presidential pol would make, "That's just Trump being Trump", still infuriates me every time.
So fuckin weird that media is just going along with this. They're basically the same age, they were in high school at the same time: during the Eisenhower administration. They're both old AF, but only one is old and a criminal.
Your question contains the answer. I mean, if you assume the ownership class wants Trump to win, then the incentives implied in your question dictate the reason CNN does only one of those things.
They made that when David Zaslav got himself so deep in debt from the WBD merger and the Hollywood strikes he helped prolong/create, installing fascism was his fastest way out of it
That's what CNN thinks is important about the debate. I already know which one of them is mentally fit. I'm more interested in hearing Biden speak on the continuation of his economy. I already know that Trump is going to babble like an idiot.
I'll also never understand it in business either.
"We expected to a profit of $3 billion this year. We only profited $2.99 billion. Since we didn't meet expectations, our stock price dropped. We must now fire hundreds of workers."
Tonight is going to be a shit show of little substance and will help exactly 0 people makeup their minds. I am glad I don’t have cable so I can’t be tempted to watch.
Correct. I've said countless times this year that I believe a lot of our populace still views Trump as his 2016 self.
The amount of changes from 70 years old to 78 is already a lot. Add to that being president and having a near-death COVID experience and you get his current babbling-incoherent form
There's a flavor of journalist who expects a certain flair for media manipulation and gets offended if parties don't do it well. This is a straight line path to institutional capture and these people should retire.
Am I crazy in thinking that nobody will watch this outside of people who have to for work? People who are hyper aware about politics already know who they’ll vote for & people who aren’t don’t even know there’s a debate because it’s late fucking June and they won’t pay attention until October.
For decades news outlets have manufactured content to increase viewing time/ratings share, notably by conjuring political expectations from spotty info and/or without significant change in underlying facts. This trend led to CNN's 24-hour FOMO model, which was notoriously short on content for years.
Apparatchniks evolved in symbiosis with the redirection from covering events to the FOMO model and delivering increasing content and entertainment value. Seems much more about what helps the org's bottom line than what is necessary or correct to the journalists that work in the system.
I'm having trouble imagining press doing anything else. These events feel like they give us the opposite of insight. We'll hear from some media that Biden won with class, and from others that Trump won with machismo, or that both seem to be terrible.
It reminds me of the way tabloids (back when they were distinct from “real” newspapers) used to have annual psychics’ predictions for the coming year in Dec, but never managed to include a scorecard of accuracy of those predictions at the end of the year. So easy to dream, so hard to be right.
But we have to see how they perform based on the prior odds! Will Biden beat the spread! Here they come around the last turn, it’s neck and neck! Who will finish ahead!
No joke we’ve been bitching about the horse race it seems for decades now and they just will not be responsible. Drama sells.
Ugh, flashbacks to 2000 when the pre-debate discourse was nonstop "Gore is so articulate and Bush is just a bumbling guy from TX, he's going to get eaten alive." Then Bush "won" the debate by merely having both a subject and verb in a sentence.
"Republicans are 20d chessing a Kobayashi Maru"
Oh, how?
"They're saying things to reporters that get uncritically amplified and credulously speculated on ad naseum."
Stop then.
"Well, you see, election year, numbers, technically newsworthy. . ."
I see there’s been some confusion on the word “apparatchiks” so I googled it for us! Meditating on all possible implications and connotations… it seems apt enough!
How’s that for word salad!? 🥗
If the general public has higher expectations for one candidate over the other, there's no need to even discuss which candidate is better. There's only the question of why anyone who holds these expectations would even consider voting for the second candidate once they realize they're doing this.
So here we are. Two old men trying to show Not that they are the more for one, but that the other is the Less fit one. Why elect the best of the people when you can fight over second worst right?
Not sure if they are communists as they all fluff out the news web page with guesses of what the news will be like when it's really news. They never look back on their forecast accuracy or the impact of their guesses as that can be the intention of their yellow journalism.
