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A Remarkable Moment
This is a fascinating segment on several levels. The “everyday” people, as “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan calls them, have some interesting answers, but more interesting is the host and her questions, her demeanor, and her many attempts to cajole, push, and spin the folks into saying something positive.
It can be seen as a microcosmic metaphor for the current state of how the media has found itself at its limits on its ability to “manufacture consent,” as our friend Noam Chomsky puts it.
That CBS chose to air this segment is itself remarkable.
My Spidey sense tells me that the media is abandoning President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. There are other clues too. Something’s up.
By the end of the segment, I found myself wondering if CBS was just doing a CYA and rebuking the Biden press handlers. Seen through this lens, Ms. Brennan was doing a fine job shilling for the administration, but this segment reveals that the everyday folks aren’t buying it. At all.
CBS to Biden admin press coordinators: See, we are trying, but it’s not working.
Until further notice, I consider anything the mainstream media says or does as manipulative and propagandistic. Nothing is as it seems.
Democrats must get rid of Biden and Harris pronto before the midterms, somehow. I don’t know if they have a plan or if they are just winging it and have decided to just dump them and hope for the best.
Or, it could be that CBS has decided to go back to basic journalism?
That would be my last consideration.
Published in General
Media Operative: “What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you appreciate your $1,400 checks and $300 a month child tax credits courtesy of the Great Leader?”
I know! Revealing question, in’t it?
What a joke! I just kept snickering as the people refused to be coerced into lying to her. They were happy to tell the truth. And I loved this comment of yours, Franco:
This must be followed by a shoulder shrug! Good grief, people, we are living through a disaster.
That last line is something. “You can’t keep doing that. I almost feel like the administration came in and said ‘You know what? We’re gonna do everything the opposite of what Trump did’.”
Didn’t they?
I think they prided themselves on it.
Good point. Having no direction and being 100% against Trump, pridefully as you say, their default policy would be just do the opposite.
Although how Fauci survives I will never understand….
The intro and the outro are precious: “Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been listening to Americans…,” as if she and her audience regard these “Americans” are some sort of anthropological curiosity. (Why not “we’ve been listening to you”?) And to our hostess they are curiosities. She is overtly incredulous when they reject the Democratic party’s sales pitch at face value. She cannot believe the peasants are revolting.
And she couldn’t hide her patronizing “Kids Say the Darndest Things” reactions whenever the peasants diverged from the Dem propaganda line.
So I had to look her up. Our hostess went to a tony prep school and then UVA, graduating with highest honors. She and her attorney husband have a net worth of $7 million. We are fools to expect an empathetic, fedora-and-shoe-leather treatment from this class of folks. We should expect from these folks what we’ve been getting in greater portions ever since Tim Russert died: class condescension.
I think Trump actually tried to replace fauci halfway through.
But where does the MSM go? The current personnel are entirely incapable of returning to any kind of professionalism and honest attempts at objectivity. Nor can they treat the right with respect much less move rightward themselves.
If they turn on Biden (or simply stop providing cover) won’t they have to quickly elevate a successor or some alternative to inevitable GOP rule?
My guess is that (perhaps even before the impending mid- term slaughter), there is a move to push Harris out, then anoint a gloriously MSM-acceptable successor. Biden can then be pushed aside and the anointed one can finish the term nobly taking legislative positions the evil GOP Congress will reject. And the media can happily resume their preferred mode.
A reminder that being “manipulative and propagandistic” IS what basic journalism has always been. Even in the “fedora and shoe-leather” days. Journalistic “professionalism” has never been about “honest attempts at objectivity”. There is no golden age of reporting to which to “return”; there is no noble core of the “profession” to which its practitioners can be recalled.
Yes and I wonder if that person has already been anointed. It could well be Hillary. She’s the only one who has all the ingredients. Likeability isn’t there, but everything else is. Money, the network, experience – such as it is.
But they have to get Harris out first. Removing Biden will be easy.
I don’t think the PTB in the Dem Party want to go there. The likely surge in suicide rates at the prospect of a Hillary-Trump rematch must scare even Democrats. The same billionaire group that purchased the 2020 election will likely want a true lefty inserted, one who can fake normal, look good on camera and lie convincingly.
I’m thinking it will be that Klobuchar from Minnesota. I also noticed that when Hillary was being foisted again, there wasn’t any of the racial bean counting being discussed. I find that interesting too – like the “memo” went out and it’s not a factor now so zip it!
Does this make more sense?
Yes, or else they really do have a replacement ready to go and and are beginning the walk-up to taking Biden out.
Thanks, @Franco, great segment.
Loved Jorge!
Biden has already doubled down on his support for Kamalla Harris, thereby putting a propaganda stumbling block on efforts to oust her. I’m not even sure what kind of process could be used to get her out of office in the first place, no matter how low her approval ratings are. Biden was an idiot to committing to choosing only a Black female as his running mate. What he got was an albatross stuck around his neck that he can’t get rid of.
I don’t think Hillary. I think if Dems want a slavering Media, it will have to be either Michelle (who seems reluctant) or Oprah (also reluctant). They’re in a real pickle, because I don’t think the media have it in them to pretend to love the Clintons anymore.
The notion that Biden is bound by anything he once said or believed is rather quaint.
Just ask Clarence Thomas.