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Intolerant, closeted, media sell hate and silence: can’t figure why electorate is so divided

Who are Trump’s loyal army asks Michael Goldfarb of the BBCMedia Bias, voting behaviour of journalists.

America is so divided in 2016 that one half of the electorate can barely understand the other. Comprehending the Donald Trump phenomenon has become the dominant theme of US election coverage…

Dear BBC et al, half the electorate is mocked, reviled, and otherwise ignored. No wonder the other half are clueless…  The divided electorates throughout the West don’t understand each other because there is no national conversation to understand. When was the last time the BBC (or ABC) employed a show host that was a skeptic, Brexit-fan, or UKIP voter?  Count the years. How about a whole panel? A series? A doco? When was the last government grant awarded to someone to explain the dangers of big-creeping-government?

It’s practically BBC official policy not to even interview people who disagree with certain views, even if that includes 62% of the British public. This is a good way to divide the electorate and create ignorance and misunderstanding, yes? It’s not that the skeptical half can’t get half the evening news, they can’t even get a 10 second, heavily edited sentence in. Greenpeace, on the other hand, get invited to high level seminars where they decide what the BBC policy will be.

A better question would be why the old media are wall-to-wall fans of Big-Gov?

In the US a smashing 96 percent of campaign donations by the media industry went to Clinton.  Only 7% of journalists identify as Republicans. How many journalists have ever run a business or lived off investments (as in a real business that sells to consumers, not to the government?)  Their wet-left academic training didn’t teach them how to investigate, or the discipline to study the ideas of their opponents. Nor is there training on the ethics of shamelessly pushing their own personal political preference. Only 20% of US people think the media even try to be unbiased. The public know there is a problem — but that doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t generate a national conversation — not one with manners and genuine curiosity instead of namecalling bun-fests.

The BBC crew realize something is missing. Someone wondered on  Oct 12th why hatred for Hillary Clinton runs so deepBy Oct 31, they were still asking Why are the candidates so unpopular.  Flummoxed, I tell you!  By golly, however did the US end up with a choice of two such unpopular candidates? Could it be because one appears to be running a crime syndicate (which nobody likes), but the old media ignores that and mocks the other candidate relentlessly.

Half the US reads the alt-media, and knows about the corruption, which makes them feel betrayed, sold out, and madder than hell. But the other half think the peak issue of the campaign is one guy’s crass bragging to another guy on a bus eleven years ago, not the $50 million dubious dollars the Secretary of State’s family made on-the-side, or the 30,000 emails she bleached after they were subpoenaed.

Thank The Media

They’ve spent a year demonising one candidate, and twenty years lauding the other. They sold a message that dumb, old, selfish people vote for a smaller government, while smart young clever things know that the answer to everything is to ask Big-Santa to solve it with the magic money made by the elves at the Treasury. They bought their own advertising.

Look at the “Loyal Army” story. To set the scene the BBC recite the litany of Donald Trump’s flaws for the 4000th time then wonder why some people aren’t convinced:

What has puzzled people who won’t be voting for him, is how tens of millions of their fellow citizens could still be willing to support him. Who are they?

 Wait til you hear the genius flash:

The answer is to be found in understanding what I call “The Bloc”.

(Otherwise known as the Middle Class Worker.)

“The Bloc, roughly 40% of the electorate, doesn’t represent a majority in the US but it is the country’s largest unified group of voters. It has lost four of the last six presidential elections but has mostly remained in control of one or both houses of Congress, and many state legislatures, making it almost impossible for Democratic administrations to govern the country.”

Hmm. How to understand the right-wing – Use standard left-voting-journalistic trick — ask another left-voter:

“One Clinton supporter I met … did understand. Bonnie Cordova, a retired schoolteacher, and I were both watching the second presidential debate at the Bohemian Beer Garden in the New York borough of Queens. I asked her afterwards if she understood why people might vote for Trump.

She did. “I taught in inner city schools for 30 years,” Cordova explained. “I was passed over a few times for promotion for a really good job because I wasn’t a minority and I was working at a school where the kids got free dental and optical treatment because they were immigrant children and I was having trouble affording it for my kids.” She acknowledged that made her resentful. “That’s a flame that can be fanned into hatred. You have to rise above it.”

The innumerate argument is that everyone should feel good about paying money to strangers to support their kids

So “The bloc” (sounds so attractive) are morally inferior people who can’t “rise above” petty jealousy. If Michael Goldfarb actually went so far as to interview a Trump supporter in depth, and tried to understand their struggles and concerns, instead of the superficial platitudes, he might find that there were numbers that don’t add up. Like bills and taxes. Mortgages. (Michael Moore gets it).

The innumerate argument is that everyone should feel good about paying money to strangers to support their kids.  But how much money? The BBC never asks. Santa will provide. That’s the more advanced conversation the country (all of the Western ones) needs to have.

Why is the campaign full of hate? Blame the media. They demonize Trump, and if they’d done a tenth of a percent of real job of investigating Clinton, the Democrats would never have selected her. The media are destroying the Democrats by not asking hard questions.

 Some of the media are, err, waking up “just in time”?

What a week — even the Washington Post (Clinton cheer squad) suddenly finds that Trump can give a good speech. Journo Chris Cillizza says Trump has a great message, “perfect” and marvels that Trump could have used this message for the whole campaign (as if he hasn’t been doing that all along). Could this be the first time Cillizza has watched a Trump speech direct rather than through the CNN filter?

Chris Cillizza: Donald Trump gave a very, very good speech today in Pennsylvania

Get ready to hear the amazing “new” message:

“I am not a politician,” Trump said. “My only special interest is you, the American people. The guiding rule of the political class in Washington, D.C., is that they are looking out only for themselves. They will say anything, and do anything, to cling to their power and prestige at your expense. I’m running to change and reverse decades of failure, and to work with the American people to create generations of success.”

That is an absolutely perfect message for this I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore electorate. People want change desperately. And almost no one believes Clinton represents that radical change — or anything close to it. Trump, in that passage above, puts his life outside of politics forward as incontrovertible evidence that he will walk the walk when it comes to bringing real change to the nation’s capitol.

What struck me most about the speech — aside from how well written and delivered it was — was that it laid bare how simply Trump could have constructed a winning message in this campaign. Cast Clinton as the status quo. Make her own every policy and every controversy of the previous Clinton and Obama administrations.

Why didn’t Trump say so before? :- )

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