Wounded Bear
Wounded Bear's JournalFreedom is like love, unless you're giving it away, it's not real...
The hardest thing about freedom is giving it to someone else.
Mostly, the RWers of the past few decades have proposed a very jingoistic, authoritarian kind of freedom.
The ratings war....
Trump is laboring under a misconception. He still thinks he is in campaign mode, and that "his" media is still dominant. The problem is that his Twitter and Alt-Right support probably at most gets read by the same number of voters reflected in his poll numbers, about 35-40%. He's a salesman at heart (nice word for a con man, I know 
. But now that he's in the office, he's got nothing to sell beyond the captive audience of his Twitterbots.
Now that the M$M is reporting on him, even as soft as some of the coverage has been, now his likeness and antics are being sent out to millions more folks around the country. Given his constant attacks on the press, it is not surprising (well, it is a little) that the HQ (honesty quotient) has actually gone up, along with the Factuality of it all.
The "real" media might be obsolete, but not quite yet, I think. They definitely dropped the ball in the election cycle, but there have been promising signs that they are picking up the pace since November. Trump may get lots of likes on social media, but now, as the only one out there he is losing the battle with the press.
Now the real task at hand for us: Tying Trump's abysmal numbers to Congressional Repubs. Theirs is the agenda we need to fight.
Thanks for making my point...
The OP was wailing that it was somehow wrong to compare FDR fireside chats with Trump tweets. I didn't see the show he was referring to, so I can't comment on that.
But the truth is, as you say, the important thing right now is that Trump has used a new technology for distributing information to his advantage and we need to learn how to counter that if liberalism is to survive. We have the superior message, I'm sure we can agree with that. How do we make people listen? Obviously, flooding the old technology didn't work well enough.
Studying our opponents is basic Sun Tzu. We can't counter them if we don't understand or even admit that they found and used a tactical advantage. There are certainly several other areas where we got out-foxed that need work, too, but this is pretty big.
You are confusing content with tactics...
FDR and JFK were both attempting to sway public opinion, just like Trump is trying to do. Their job is harder, because it is easier to instill fear and hatred than to inspire people to do good things, in any medium. Trump is trying to morph his position as "King of Tweets" or King Twit into an authoritarian presidency. Our job is to stop him.
Much like any treatment for disease or addiction, moralizing usually doesn't help, it just confuses the issue. Instead of over emphasizing what he is saying, focus on how he is saying it and how we can work to counter it. Just counter-attacking is inadequate, because we are then fighting on his turf. We need to learn to fight back effectively.
Rants may lead to short term better feelings. They don't affect folks like Trump and his supporters, who take as a badge of pride that they don't care what we think about them.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: Kent, WA
Member since: Thu Aug 27, 2009, 08:55 PM
Number of posts: 58,618
