FBI REOPENS Investigation into Hillary Clinton Emails

[Final-Fan]

LivingMetal said:

Final-Fan said:

The media and Trump are perfectly symbiotic:  he wants attention, they give it to him, they get ratings.  The subject matter is mostly Trump's own fault. 

If they are symbiotic as you say, then your logic leads that the media is just as guilty. But this thread is about the Clinton emails. You don't see the media hounding after that for ratings. What you just said has an inherent double standard. 

I don't know about you but I thought the emails got plenty of coverage at the time.  You can't expect a single scandal that drags out for months and months to get as much sustained attention as 12 scandals from the other side in the same time period get in total.  Clinton has had more than one thing but the point stands.  They gave Clinton's "deplorables" comment considerable coverage, even misconstruing it to her detriment making it sound worse than it was. 

badgenome said:

Final-Fan said:

The media and Trump are perfectly symbiotic:  he wants attention, they give it to him, they get ratings.  The subject matter is mostly Trump's own fault. 

I don't really think so. For example, Hillary Clinton brings up Alicia Machado. If Trump responds then they talk about it for days and it's all his fault for "keeping the story alive" by saying his piece about it. If he doesn't, well, they'll just talk about it for days anyway, only they'll have to find a way to squeeze it into some other, broader story like Trump having trouble with women voters.

Countless times I've seen them say, "Boy, this would be a really bad day for Hillary Clinton if Trump hadn't said X!" As if Trump is making them not talk about Clinton's problems or... I dunno, real issues, maybe. These fuckers have 24 hour networks and act like that means they're only permitted to cover one story per 24 hours, and it is always some frivilous tabloid stuff. Sure, the American corporate media is always dogshit, especially in an election year, but this has to be the most substanceless election cycle in history.

As for ratings, it seems like their ratings have mostly taken a dive after the conventions which is not coincidentally when they started waging full on war against Trump. So I don't think it's really a smart business decision. Except maybe in CNN's case since he threatened to put the kibosh on their merger.

My personal thought on the subject of the 24 hour news paradigm is that it actually makes things worse, because they are so desperate to fill that time that they build their news teams around padding the clock.  Not only does this take resources away from better journalism, but they don't necessarily pad evenly.  So, to completely start making up numbers to make a point, if there was a story that deserved half an hour out of six hours, maybe they'd pad it to two hours out of twenty-four; and if there was a story that deserved an hour, but it was really juicy and they could pad it out more easily, maybe it would get 8 hours!  And then there's just plain ridiculous, like CNN and its infamous coverage of the disappearance of MH370. 

I mean that was a terrible illustration, but I think you can see the general idea I'm trying to get across.  24 hour news is cancer.  Trump's mouth has AIDS.  You do the math. 

(I say that, but his business history is no better.  Clinton, at least, has had decades of practice at withstanding this intensity of attention; that's why her big scandal in the news is something recent, while a lot of what's hurting Trump happened a long time ago.  He hasn't had people digging through his closet for skeletons at the level you get in a presidential race.)