Listen to @mattsheffield, who worked for years inside conservative media, explain how profoundly broken it is & how its victims might be freed from its clutches. wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/s…
The most important thing Sheffield says, here & in his tweets, is that the people involved in RW media are not journalists. They are not acting on (& do not understand) journalistic principles. They are advancing the cause of US conservatism. So simple, so important, so ignored.
And what's more, they do not believe that a different approach is possible. As always, they take talk about transpartisan principles as some kind of trick, or gambit. In a zero-sum reactionary world, there are only competing groups, only group interests, nothing else.
I wish we had better language for discussing this, since you see the same patterns & dynamics playing out in different areas, at different scales, in different countries. We need a generalized vocabulary for it, better than these fumbling attempts: vox.com/policy-and-pol…

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More from @drvox

16 Nov
The idea that forgiving student debt would cause enormous political backlash among those who have no such debt, or have already paid it, reflects an utterly dismal view of humanity. It also strikes me as correct.
Social science suggests that most people do not have distinct or coherent views on political issues, the way the politically engaged do, but all humans are hyper, hyper sensitive to fairness & reciprocity. People will even act against their own self-interest on those grounds.
It is easy to whip up the resentments of non-political normies with appeals to fairness & reciprocity. You pay taxes & they get welfare? They get affirmative action but you don't? You worked your way through school and now these kids get it free? It's not fair.
Read 5 tweets
15 Nov
Watching Rogue One yet again. I maintain my unpopular opinion that Diego Luna is badly miscast in this. He's just not believable as a grizzled fighter. He's clearly a sweet, soft guy, a lover. I want to watch him in a romcom.
Hm, now it seems they're going to give that very character a whole series. imdb.com/title/tt925328…
Could be I see him that way because of the extremely strong impression Y Tu Mamá También made on me, back when I was in my peak indie-movie-appreciator days. imdb.com/title/tt024557…
Read 5 tweets
14 Nov
One thing I think about a lot is the fact that abortion was a non-issue in US politics not that long ago. RWers *made* it an issue, tied it to religion in a way it hadn't been before, in order to make religious people reliable foot soldiers for conservatism.
Now, if I were a religious person, and I found out that political operatives had deliberately manipulated me in order to gain support for policies that further enrich the wealthy ... I'd be mad! I'd rethink my position on the issue!
I do not like being manipulated. I don't understand why more people on the right don't feel that way. They seem to almost take pleasure in it, to enjoy playing their role in it.
Read 6 tweets
14 Nov
Did someone slip me acid? I would swear I saw ideological homogeneity in LEFT-leaning media being treated as a pressing, unique problem, and such a development is impossible to explain except by way of hallucination.
Rush Limbaugh *called his listeners ditto-heads*. And they loved it! That was back in the early 90s. Has anyone seen a flourishing of diversity & heterogeneity in RW media since then?
An entire movement, millions strong, is trapped in a tiny epistemic bubble being fed a stream of lies that's purposefully pushing them toward illiberalism & violence, & it's been going on for decades. But LW publications agree that discrimination is bad, so... both sides I guess?
Read 4 tweets
12 Nov
Politics is not a f'ing game, you utter thimblehead. Democrats want to spend billions addressing poverty & homelessness. Republicans want to spend nothing. That difference swamps a few token food-bank donations.

Better oligarchs, please.
There are *millions* of people like this in America, who just want all the political fighting & squabbling to stop so we can move on and [DO THINGS DEMOCRATS ARE ADVOCATING FOR AND REPUBLICANS ARE FIGHTING].
I think all the time about this great interview with singer/songwriter @TheBrandyClark on @SwitchedOnPop. Clark is a close, insightful observer of human foibles -- her songs are soaked in empathy & compassion. She's just a good person. But on politics ...

switchedonpop.com/episodes/brand…
Read 12 tweets
11 Nov
Cities produce the vast majority of economic & intellectual activity in this country, but whatever you do, don't repeat that, much less show any pride in it, lest you be accused of insufficiently venerating America's furiously mythologized ruralites.
Countdown to one of the aforementioned ruralites telling me that rural areas "feed the cities" ...
Read 8 tweets

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