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Vox article: 'Trump exploited a broken press. Here's how to fix it.'
Last edited Fri Oct 23, 2020, 11:43 PM - Edit history (1)
Last Friday, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was confronted by a CBS reporter as he stepped off a plane. “What is your response to the New York Post story about your son, sir?”
To his credit, Biden dismissed the question, but that’s not really the point. The story the reporter was referencing, which was peddled to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, is absolute bullshit. The staff journalist who wrote the story even reportedly refused to put his name on the byline out of concerns that it was bogus and unreliable.
If any of this reminds you of Hillary Clinton’s fake email scandal in 2016, it should. Then, as now, the goal of people like Giuliani was to get the press to cover a story not in order to convince people that it’s true, but to amplify a false narrative and divert attention — and maybe drive the public to exhaustion. It’s a strategy that Steve Bannon colorfully dubbed “flooding the zone with shit.”
I’ve written about this problem more than once (here and here) and yet I still struggle to come up with viable solutions. The pattern is always the same: Trump, or operators working on his behalf, flood the zone with shit and the media responds as it always does: it covers the story. Even though much of the coverage is skeptical, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent argued, the mere fact that stories are printed with the words “Biden” and “emails” means the zone-flooding approach succeeded.
To his credit, Biden dismissed the question, but that’s not really the point. The story the reporter was referencing, which was peddled to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, is absolute bullshit. The staff journalist who wrote the story even reportedly refused to put his name on the byline out of concerns that it was bogus and unreliable.
If any of this reminds you of Hillary Clinton’s fake email scandal in 2016, it should. Then, as now, the goal of people like Giuliani was to get the press to cover a story not in order to convince people that it’s true, but to amplify a false narrative and divert attention — and maybe drive the public to exhaustion. It’s a strategy that Steve Bannon colorfully dubbed “flooding the zone with shit.”
I’ve written about this problem more than once (here and here) and yet I still struggle to come up with viable solutions. The pattern is always the same: Trump, or operators working on his behalf, flood the zone with shit and the media responds as it always does: it covers the story. Even though much of the coverage is skeptical, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent argued, the mere fact that stories are printed with the words “Biden” and “emails” means the zone-flooding approach succeeded.
More at link
Source: Vox
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