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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

> Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments? If so, what were the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close?

To be honest the most interesting thing to me is the US media. I don't think it has ever been so openly hostile towards one party and so hungry to cause a civil war. They're not even hiding it any more. They're operating as if the country were at war against the Republican Party and any person who is not a card-carrying Democrat must be eliminated, de-platformed, or represented in the most farcical way possible. It's incredible. It's the stuff that totalitarian states struggle to achieve, yet it seems to have happened "organically" in the US.

If I were a hostile actor I wouldn't even need to mount propaganda or spend money on my own content - I would just need to amplify the US media's message.

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The media's job is not to fawn over the president, actually. They are to report the news and tell the people when the president lies.

Therefore, they are doing a great job.

By the way, the most watched cable news is Fox News. I assume you aren't talking about them?

> The media's job is not to fawn over the president

I wonder if you felt the same way from 2008 to 2016 when they were fawning over the previous president. It's interesting that they do a great job only when a certain political party happens to be in power.

It's easy to be the most watched cable news when every other mainstream channel is carrying water for the opposition party.

Have you ever considered that perhaps reality actually does align more closely with how the media portrays it than the exact opposite?

Just _perhaps_ Republican presidents are worse than Democrat presidents?

Depends on the channel you listen to.

This comment is just more of the hate-mongering. "I saw an article I didn't agree with: I'm being attacked!" In the same threads, we hear of the bubbles people build by reading only agreeable news. How can all that be true at the same time? It cannot.

Voting predilections in the US are strongly correlated with the highest attained educational level of the voter. "The Media" as a monolithic structure has a higher average attained educational level than the country at large.

The "why" is obvious; I find a better question would be, are they wrong?

I don't think that's the case at all. If there's any problem with the media, it has been overly deferential to power.

That's always been the case. But whatever one thinks of Trump, it's pretty obvious that his campaign and post-election behavior is fundamentally different than presidents in living memory. He has rewritten the rules. The media just hasn't been able to adapt successfully to that, and still often writes about him and his administration as if they're covering things in a different era.

Among many others, journalism professor Jay Rosen has long been making this point, and made it again recently on his blog: https://pressthink.org/2020/04/a-current-list-of-my-top-prob...

If you were a member of the media and the President of the United States - of any party - suggested people try injecting bleach as a cure (for anything), what would you do?

What would you say about other politicians who implicitly supported such irresponsible behavior.

This isn't even a political question - I mean it's basic science. Bleach.

Nobody suggested injecting bleach, please stop spreading exaggerated misinformation.

In the interest of complete clarity and understanding I went and found the exact transcript and this was exactly what was stated:

“I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. "

Really? Calling it bleach instead of disinfectant is the important source of misinformation here? The lengths people will go...

I have no dog in this fight, but totally natural and edible things like lemon juice and vinegar are also used as a disinfectant.

Sure bleach can be considered a disinfectant, but not all disinfectants are bleach. I do find it fun to extrapolate that Trump was telling people to go drink bleach and die though. Very entertaining during these lockdown times.

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