Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

This Is A Problem

Trump's real genius is in self-promotion.  He's very good at it.

So, when he says he saved a bunch of Ford jobs, he's being half truthful.

When he says he saved the independent ethics office, he's pretty close to lying.

What Trump has realized is that the first headline is all that matters.  The subsequent follow-up is irrelevant.  People think Trump saved those Carrier jobs.  He really didn't.  But the headlines said he did and the follow-ups that explained "It's complicated" get lost.

This is Trump's media hack, and it works brilliantly (sadly).  Given our current media environment, I have little faith that they can embrace the complexity necessary for this to work in the service of factual accuracy.

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