The media spent the entire holiday season chasing ratings and page views by scaring you into believing Christmas gifts would arrive late, even as Biden was taking steps to prevent that. Now that gifts are arriving on time as expected, the media is pretending it's shocking news.
The mainstream media uses this tactic ALL THE TIME. It spends weeks or months getting ratings by pretending a bad thing is going to happen, then when it doesn't happen, it gets another round of ratings by pretending it's breaking news that the bad thing didn't happen after all.
Remember when the media spent three weeks acting like the DOJ was never going to indict Steve Bannon, and then labeled it "breaking news" when the indictment happened? It was always going to happen. And they knew it. But hey, let's add phony reality show style suspense to this.
These media antics are harmful, and not just because it disinforms people in the moment. It creates lasting false impressions. People trust Garland far less than they should, because they think he decided not to indict Bannon and then just caved at the last minute or something.
Because of the media's antics, people have far less faith in Biden's abilities than they should. They don't know that he took smart steps to make sure Christmas gifts arrived on time, and instead they think Biden blew it and the gifts showed up on time by through luck.
Hell, the media spent the start of 2021 convincing everyone that a lame but sort of harmless Joe Manchin was instead an evil supervillain, and once he realized the public was convinced he was going to do cartoon evil stuff, he decided to just start playing the part. On and on.
The mainstream media, in its quest for ratings and page views, turns non-stories into doomsday scandals, and turns mediocre situations into disastrous ones. And since Trump left and stopped handing them free ratings, their ratings-driven antics have gotten so much worse in 2021.
And then there's the media narrative that 'Trump will run in 2024 and he'll win no matter what'
Nevermind that he's visibly in sharp decline, that his own handlers have spent all year trying to keep him hidden for this reason, and that he's going to prison in New York.
Nevermind that he's visibly in sharp decline, that his own handlers have spent all year trying to keep him hidden for this reason, and that he's going to prison in New York.
It's not just that the media is chasing ratings by pushing an untrue narrative about Trump and 2024. It's that in order to keep that narrative intact, the media is (mostly) downplaying or ignoring important stories about Trump's health, legal troubles, etc, that conflict with it.
How can Trump be viable in 2024 if he's near death, half senile, or in state prison? He can't. How can Trump win in 2024 with polls that say half of Republicans want a different nominee? He can't. So that all gets ignored, because it threatens the "Trump 2024" ratings gold mine.
Again, these false narratives are harmful, and not just because it disinforms the public in the present. This false Trump 2024 narrative gives Trump cover for running a faux "2024 campaign" in 2021 and 2022 and pocketing the money.
And of course when we reach a point in 2022 or 2023 where it's just so painfully obvious that Trump isn't going to be a legitimate 2024 candidate, and the media can't hype it for ratings anymore, they'll say it's shocking "breaking news" that Trump won't be in the 2024 race.
At which point we'll have a whole new problem, because the corrupt Republicans who will be actual 2024 presidential candidates will have gotten cover from all the media's focus on Trump, and thus won't be properly vetted for scandals early on enough.
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