Would you spend $8/month for Twitter Blue?

You remember incorrectly. The media and the left absolutely wouldn't stop taking all the bait he kept dropping on them. And even when he wasn't giving them ammo, they'd just make **** up the other 50% of the time so they could talk about him. Ignoring him is the literal opposite of what happened. With their help, he sucked up all the oxygen in the room.

 

I'll have to look it up but I'm very sure that he was mostly mocked. I recall Joe Scaraborough warning that he could actually win and many other pundits mocking him for saying that.

Anyway it still was Republicans that voted for him. If he had won the Democratic nomination your argument would be more on point.

 

here is from a quick search of Joe Scaraborough pointing out how he had warned Trump could win when other media outlets weren't taking him seriously.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/joe-s...d-trump-win-media-had-a-blind-spot?ref=scroll

 

You're conflating "making fun of" or "not taking seriously" with "ignoring".

Making fun of him is part of the recipe. That's attention. Headlines. Mindshare.

Sure, Trump being an anomaly in a large field of copy-pasted Reaganite automatons helped, but the left did the other half of the job for him by absolutely never shutting the **** up about him.

 

A lot of people get fun of and don't win the Presidency. Rudy Giuliani is viciously mocked and his two runs for President went no where.

And again Republicans were the one's that voted him in not Democrats.

is your argument that Republicans have no agency so it's Democrats fault that Trump rose to power?

Also you're still leaving out that Trump was the President, that his supporters invaded the Capitol to try to overturn the election, and that there are many Republicans running for office literally on the platform that Trump should still be President and that if they win they will contravene voting laws in their states to not certify on that basis.

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem aren't Leftitst. They didn't win the Democratic primaries. It's possible they don't win the Republican Primaries without Trump's support. Just ask JD Vance who hated Trump but in Trump's own words kissed his ass.

 

Lol. So the media did what the media does in order to generate eyeballs and clicks…..

It’s just some naive, hindsight to take this position that if only the Leftist media had “shut up”…. As if some boorish, populist getting nominated and winning the GOP party isn’t newsworthy….

 

I thought it was obvious, but I'm speaking exclusively to Trump prior to the 2016 election.

The sitting President of the US doesn't need help getting attention.

 

I think you have a bit of a point in 2015 and also to note Trump was already famous having nothing to do with politics before but once Trump won the nomination it was the Republican party that rallied around him, didn't abandon him after the Access Hollywood Video, and ultimately voted him into office. Republicans like Lindsey Graham who called him a "kook" and a "racist" who became his biggest enablers.

The idea that Trump is relevant because of the Left not only doesn't fit the actual facts but more dangerous than that is that it removes responsibility from those who actually support him and are even willing to go so far as to break the law for him.

 

I stand by what I said.

The left was an active, albeit unknowing, participant in the advancement of the Trump campaign.

I did not say they were exclusively responsible, or even a majority responsible.

But they, as with Musk, gave him an inordinate amount of attention and only served to further empower them.

Sidenote: I also agree with dmoney, that the media is going to follow the dollar... which speaks to my point, that so many dollars wouldn't have been there if the left wasn't so obsessed with Trump IMO.

 

You're right. It is a hard balance to strike.

However, revisiting the moment, the headlines were just all Trump all the time.

They reported on every single fart the man made. And it felt like half the time it was made up or significantly embellished.

Whatever truly heinous stuff Trump was doing/saying got largely lost in the absolute avalanche of nonsense and lies that were being reported.

And yeah, the whole 'normalizing of Trump' thing was its own gigantic mistake. Sold their soul for ratings.

 

Deflect, Deny, Delay.

 

I'd say the opposite.

 

Your argument is it's the media's fault for Republicans voting for Donald Trump as President. That's a twist in logic. It's also the media's fault for covering someone who would go onto be President of the United States as though that isn't something media would cover.

Is it Fox, OANN and Newsmax's fault that Biden is President? Is it the conservative media that's driving Democratic voters to vote for Biden because conservatives won't ever shut the **** up about him? If only conservative media would stop talking about Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, Democrats would simply stop voting them into office. That's where your logic takes you. You make no sense.

It took months for Clutch to help me get my account back after repeated emails and multiple accounts created that also contributed. I still get ads when I check this site on my mobile phone. A LOT OF ADS. Paying to support this site doesn't actually reduce the things it promised it'd do and customer support certainly didn't improve. The general philosophy of you get what you pay for isn't universally true is what I'm saying and that doesn't only extend to this site.

Again there's already Youtube and even a paid content service like Nebula, which YT content creators use when they want to do a video essay on a topic that YT's algorithm would probably demonetize or remove from viewing. Content creators also collect 55% of ad revenue and collect 70% of revenue from live viewer streaming when donations from things like Superchat occur on YT. When they want to talk about riskier topics that YT would flag, they share on Nebula or their own patreon support page as well as discord. Even a YT channel with a dedicated following of 300+active viewers on live video sessions can pull in thousands of dollars for an hour Q+A session on a particular topic.

There's already other social media platforms and likely newer ones that will be created when Twitter goes the way of Gab/Parler/Truth social to fill in the niche that Twitter currently does. Probably from the same software developers that helped startup and operate Twitter that probably got a good chunk o' change from the buyout. It's very probable the billions Elon's had to fork over just to buy Twitter will be used against him in investment of a competitive alternative from the same staff that started up Twitter.

$44b buyout of a company valued at $10b. A portion of that $44b goes into investment of a competitive alternative to Twitter and causes enough users to jump ship from Elon's Twitter to the competitive alternative sinking Twitter's value even further, $8/mo blue check marks be damned. Wouldn't be a heavy investment to operate a competitive alternative to Twitter either.

If the idea that $8/mo is supposed to be a verification of improved quality of some service, isn't that what Angie's List is? That service has been around almost 30 years already.

https://www.angi.com/

Any professionals on that site have to pay to advertise their services on it. In theory, this paywall barrier is intended to weed out the professional services of workers that don't do quality work, but really all it is is a paywall to advertise. The reviews of customers that receive professional help in the end will determine whether the services rendered were optimal or subpar. Not the amount per month paid to adverise.

 

I should put a finer point on this in that, after the nomination, the die was largely cast and so I doubt there was much influence past that point. Certainly whatever influence there was based on coverage paled in comparison to what happened during the primary.

To that end, if you don't believe that giving attention (undeserved attention IMO) to a person in a very crowded, competitive popularity contest increases their chances of winning, then I don't know what to tell you.

Is it the 'media's fault Republicans voted for Trump'? In the primary, I'd say they empowered him, for sure.

 

I think your point is more valid during the presidency (but as President, you simply can't ignore him) but not during the campaign. I recall it was not the left but the media during the 2016 campaign. The 24/7 news media covered his campaign/rally speeches without interruption, basically giving him not just billions in free airtime of infotainment, but a platform to jump-start and then continue the campaign run through the primaries. Remember this started during the Republican primaries and before the general. The media happily played the role for rating.

Musk is a different animal. He already got 120M followers.

 

Agreed that none of us took him seriously and I admit I overestimated the intelligence of americans to choose orange.

I assumed Clinton would blow him out I was wrong. I couldn't stomach Hillary myself so in a way I suppose as a member of "not the extreme right" I contributed.

Now I believe a lot of us are dialed in and I think about the days when I can not care again but that is likely over. So I suppose that was one of the pieces of orange legacy.

The idea that the left wants a villain I believe is false. If anything lots of people myself included want to not care and are now forced to.

 

Attention yes but a lot of poeple get attention who don't become President or who people aren't willing to break the law for. The vast majority of the responsibility lies on the people who actually voted and enabled Trump. Trying to lay this on the "Left" or media is whether you intend it or not is deflection of blame. It's those on the Right who claim they don't like Trump but still defend him a rationalization.

In otherwords it's more of the Right wallowing in victimhood. In this case they are victims because the Left and media pushed Trump on them and they have no agency in voting for him, supporting him otherwise or defending him.

 

I didn't think Trump would win but that didn't stop me from donating, campaigning and voting for Clinton.