MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow said it is “irresponsible” of news organizations to carry former President Trump’s remarks when they know he is going to make false statements.
As the network cut away from Trump’s Super Tuesday victory speech, Maddow said whether to provide live continuous coverage of the former president’s public remarks “is a decision that we revisit constantly.”
The balance, she said, is “between allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air about things they’ve lied about before — and you can predict they are going to lie about.”
“And so, therefore, it is just irresponsible to allow them to do that,” she continued in comments first highlighted by Mediaite.
Media has a huge part of the responsibility for both Trump and what the Republican party has become.
It’s like they don’t acknowledge they have a responsibility, as one of the pillars of democracy.
There’s a difference between reporting, and reporting lies. To report both sides equally, is no longer a responsible balance.
Not only that, but the clickbait media-sphere has slowly eroded “news” outlets to the point where they no longer cover things like “healthcare”, “taxation”, or “education”. Now they cover polls, donors, polls, primaries, rallies, polls, conventions, polls, elections, exit polls, approval polls, disapproval polls, etc, pretty much non-stop from election to election. The incessant drone of horse race journalism is drowning out any even remotely meaningful coverage of actual things that are happening in people’s lives. Long form and investigative journalism has been displaced by low effort politics-as-sport commentary.
Is there any wonder, then, how one of the major political parties was completely overtaken by a man who’s singularly obsessed with “winning” against “losers”? We’ve been fed a 20-year diet of who-beats-who monotony, and all the actual issues in the country are glossed over as boring and irrelevant. They fed people non-stop infotainment, and then people fell in line behind a vapid, loud-mouthed reality TV billionaire.
You nailed it.