Trump threatens to use military on US citizens (8 minutes)

New York City? Chicago? How about Iowa City? Des Moines? Waterloo? Minneapolis?

As the 2024 campaign unfolds the press continues to simply turn it into a horse race. When your news industry is a profit center in a large corporation, they must do something to draw eyeballs that will entice industries to want to advertise on their media because of the number of eyeballs the media outlet can deliver to the advertiser.

Therefore, the media must deliver a compelling product – a story that will keep people tuning in trying to guess the ending, following all the twists and turns in the race of races. Forget about any issues. Issues do not deliver eyeballs – tight contests do. And so the corporate profit center media must do all they can to deliver an audience – truth be damned!

A report came out this week from the Columbia Journalism Review, arguably the premiere watchdog of American news reporting. What it found was a scathing indictment of of America’s premier newspapers the New York Times and the Washington Post.

When the CJR did s review the results were rather astonishing. As reported by Thom Hartmann the findings show a big bias toward the far right:

“Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties. …

“By the numbers, of four hundred and eight articles on the front page of the Times during the period we analyzed, about half—two hundred nineteen—were about domestic politics. A generous interpretation found that just ten of those stories explained domestic public policy in any detail; only one front-page article in the lead-up to the midterms really leaned into discussion about a policy matter in Congress: Republican efforts to shrink Social Security.

“Of three hundred and ninety-three front-page articles in the Post, two hundred fifteen were about domestic politics; our research found only four stories that discussed any form of policy. The Post had no front-page stories in the months ahead of the midterms on policies that candidates aimed to bring to the fore or legislation they intended to pursue. Instead, articles speculated about candidates and discussed where voter bases were leaning.”

You can read the original report at Columbia Journal Report.

Robert Reich also did a great analysis Monday. Reich noted that the press really helps the far right:

First, it’s drawing a false equivalence between Trump and Biden — claiming that Biden’s political handicap is his age, while Trump’s corresponding handicap is his criminal indictments. (Rubbish says Reich)

Secondly, every time the mainstream media reports on another move by Trump and his Republican allies toward neofascism, it tries to balance its coverage by pointing out some fault in the Democratic Party (such as the ongoing federal corruption and bribery case against Senator Bob Menendez).

Finally, blaming both sides for this chaos plays into Trump’s and his allies’ goal of wanting Americans to believe the nation has become ungovernable, so it needs a strongman.

As you know, we here at blogforiowa.com have been media critics for aa long time. I can’t remember for sure, but as I remember it blogforiowa actually grew out of attempts to do some media reform. It may not have worked then but we will keep at it. If nothing else many people are seeing the reality of a MAGA Party destroying the country and realizing that it doesn’t line up with what the media is reporting.

Understand that you are only a salable commodity to them. Time to work on your critical reading skills. 

Here is a short list of real issues that the corporate media is not covering, that the MAGA Party is either ignoring or lying on but Democrats are working on because they could have very serious consequences in the lives of real people:

Climate Crisis — will Trump end democracy? — War in Ukraine —War and instability in the Middle East  — Education — Inflation — Housing — Health Care — Social Security and medicare — Access to Abortion — Women’s rights — election integrity — water quality — unemployment — weapons of mass murder available to civilians (I could go on but dinner calls).