Said it before, but I think the fact that we could have a *war in Mexico* if Trump is reelected should probably feature more prominently in campaign coverage and Biden's case against him.
@kevinmkruse.bsky.social@ryanlcooper.com In all seriousness, tweets *calling for* pieces about this get more RTs than actual pieces about it do. I did a stand-alone piece *interviewing the former Mexican ambassador to the US* about all this and nobody cared.
It's just a simple fact of how the info ecosystem works. Critics like @jayrosen.bsky.social constantly demand pieces laying out the stakes of the election, which is a good thing, but many actual pieces about those stakes mostly pass unnoticed. People like media criticism more than real journalism.
Greg is not wrong. I try to highlight good pieces, and say "this is good!" (as I did today) but I am also aware that this is not where the social media market is. The market is with headlines and quick examples of well known or suspected weaknesses. The refusal to click a link sometimes astounds me.
Often that's a function of the fact that the criticism isn't paywalled but the reporting is. Why click through to something you aren't permitted to read?
Does this provide context for how the NYT constantly baits/trolls its audience? Or is that just who they are? Like, if the clicks aren't there for an honest article they'll just find the angle where the clicks are there?
Perhaps. Bad headlines and bad journalism end up getting multiple times the attention on social media than many pieces that actually do what media critics ask for get. It's just a fact that this happens, and the media critics don't ever really address this (to my knowledge, anyway).
Yeah that's fair. I'll cop to this charge. I think there's *also* a lot of bad-faith journalism, though not by you, sir, but the audience, e.g. me et al., has a responsibility to find and share good pieces.
And that's really not insanely hard. We can do that.
it feels like the problem is institutional. The news industry is large, and there are many reporters (like yourself) who are doing great work. However, as an institution, it feels like (for example) the NYT REALLY wants me to know that Biden is old, and doesn’t much care about anything else
Not sure about that. Every single reproductive rights story that comes out from major media is framed that this is the one thing that might be bad for trump or how gleeful the dems are to have this for the election.
When the damn stories should be about the impacts on, ya know, actual women?
It doesn't help that his stated agenda is so unhinged that just reporting on it will get a "don't be hysterical" response. Also, you rock, thanks for fighting the good fight.
IMO there is rarely any respect afforded by the US (politicians, publications, popular sentiment) toward Mexican government officials, least of all now when there is a left-liberal government.
A lot of it is pure bluster. And a lot more is this scammy "give my friends money so I can pretend to do the things".
What bothers me is Trump pretending war with Mexico for four years. Then Next Dem refuses to stop pretending, because Precedent/Polls. Then some red state governor gets serious.
The Wall is a great example.
So much of what he did was just funnel enormous sums to the shadiest and most incompetent contractors imaginable. What got built was eroded or collapsed in short order.
Now you've got Abbott throwing razor wire into the Rio Grande and claiming *that* is the wall.
Similarly, "Renegotiate NAFTA" was deck chairs on the Titanic. He spent a great deal of time in photo ops without materially changing US/Mexico business relations relative to the Clinton Era.
We have been fueling Mexican border violence for over 20 fucking years. It is not like Biden is a poster child for detante on this. Hell his fucking Biden plan under Obama for the Northern Triangle was some of the biggest fuel to the fire on all of this.
Way over 20. You can stretch it back to Operation Wetback in 1954.
Biden has been pure garbage on border politics, because he's so fixated on winning older, whiter Midwest/Southwest voters.
But he didn't start the fire.
This is just annoying additions done to overshadow the active policy decisions the current president has been involved with during his career to make this issue worse, like the pointless escalations in the drug war, and the destabilizing of Central America by arming far right death squads.
Talk is cheap. There were so many people saying they’d move to Canada if Trump got elected in ‘16 who then memory holed that plan the next day.
Not to say it won’t happen. But it’s going to be people from Latin America who go to Canada so that they don’t get deported, not a centrist from LA
It is much harder to legally move to Canada than many may expect. We have our own laws pertaining to immigration. It's like Canada is a sovereign nation with borders and a legal system, which in many senses it is.
People who think of Canada as their lifeboat should remember that Canada's reaction to the St. Louis, loaded with desperate Jews fleeing the existential threat presented by the Nazis, was to sent the ship and its passengers back to Europe, where many of the refugees died in the Holocaust.
Not yet. Probably. In about 30 or 40 years, when global warming destroys American agriculture, drowns the southeastern coastlines, and renders the southern 1/3 of the country uninhabitable? Then there’ll be trouble.
