RW media--especially FOX News--was a significant factor in inflaming American anger at inflation under Biden, running hundreds of segments on how terrible it was, how everyone was getting screwed, etc. Despite our inflation levels being pretty much the lowest in world at the time.
If it had been Trump in the Oval instead, no doubt FOX would've run hundreds of segments instead on how much *higher* inflation was in every other country. And that we should thank our lucky stars for such a divinely anointed 4D business genius as POTUS, who though his masterful abilities single-handedly kept inflation low.
And as Trump's stupid Iran War pushes gas and diesel prices ever higher, Biden's IRA--expanding our Electro-stack industries and infrastructure--will be reappreciated for the sensible and necessary policy it still is. Which makes me wonder how much of Trump2's ongoing hostility to Electro is him following the the dictates of our Petro Barons.
FOX news is a huge problem - it reaches masses of people who believe everything they say - Biden was the worst president ever - his economy was the worst - illegal immigration of criminals was the worst!
The people who voted for Trump don't read columns like this one, they rely on FOX for all their news and they are being thoroughly misled.
It's sadly a good thing that Trump is performing so poorly - I hope that at least some of the viewers will turn away from that station.
Unless the Dems have a veto-proof majority in '28, and can pass some sort of "Truth in News" law, or somesuch, the fabricated nonsense from FOX will continue to spew.
Last week there was a poll that showed that only 58% of conservatives who *don't* watch FOX approved of the new Trump-Epstein war; compared to 83% of conservatives who do.
You may not need new "truth in news" legislation... just diligently apply the laws that constrain the concentration of media ownership... and fund PBS so there is a mix of motivations as to what makes news.
Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine, (which needed updating because it didn't cover cable news which is why Fox propaganda channel is able to lie with impunity) and Reagan fast-tracked Murdoch's citizenship so he could own Fox. Roger Ailes, Nixon's media guy dreamt up Fox news because they saw the value in Russian propaganda and wished to create it here. https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created
Clinton got rid of the Glass-Steagal act. Which also needed updating.
IMHO. The FOX technique was perfected, arguably, by Putin’s crew. We have been transformed while we were distracted by shiny objects. What we have now is a new “delivery of news” world. Yes, yes: free press. But in my humble opinion, we need to do the hard work of legislating to deal with it. And for that we need to have people in Congress who are capable of writing good law. (Not Joe Blow the successful businessperson.)
My guess is the average viewer of Fox News in 2024 would have absolutely no idea that Covid-era inflation was significantly higher in Europe than it was in the U.S. – inflation actually broke over 10% in Europe.
Hard to blame that on President Biden, so just don’t mention it! Talk about how bad the crime is in New York City instead, which is actually at 60-year lows.
"Talk about how bad the crime is in New York City instead, which is actually at 60-year lows."
MS-Now, and to a lesser extent other MSM outlets did just that, pushing back on the FOX News narrative that Biden Economy Crime was at historic highs--instead of historic lows. But during the post-Covid inflation spike, Biden Admin made the stupid mistake of saying that inflation wasn't that bad.
Instead they should've had Jen Psaki have daily press briefings covering how much *worse* inflation was in Germany, England, France, Italy, Poland, Japan, Turkey, China, etc., etc. Covering a new country every day. To keep driving the point home, and forming effective counterprogramming to FOX bullshit.
Trump just ignored Congress and went on his way by Executive Order letting the Supreme Court decide whether or not his actions were legal. That's one way of governing.
I think polls should routinely report Republican opinion in two segments - those who get their 'news' from Fox and its ilk, and those who rely on mainstream media.
The First Amendment is pretty clear. No matter what Fox calls itself, we are not going to be able to pass laws that compel it to be more truthful. Lying isn't illegal and can't constitutionally be made illegal. As Fox found to its woe, there are a few situations in which this is not the case - such as when your lies defame someone. (Ka-ching!) There are other categories of speech that can be constrained such as, e.g., making threats against someone, or committing a fraud or perjury (lying under oath), etc. But any law to the effect that you just can't lie to the public just ain't going to pass Constitutional muster.
It's a mix. Sometimes they lie outright. The "People are saying..." FOX byline, is a tell when they've just made something up; like the dogs and cats in Ohio lede. Or that we've been at war with Iran since 1979.
Or they use video and stills from different news stories in different times and places, and pass them off as current coverage. Which happened a lot during the George Floyd protests.
Or they 98% fail to cover newsworthy content, like FOX has done by almost completely ignoring all Jeffrey Epstein scandal coverage.
Or they take something obscure like Critical Race Theory--a grad school course even 99.8% of grad students had never even heard of, and pretend it's used to race-shame white kids in every public school nationally.
I've long believed that what Fox doesn't report is as damaging as what they do "report."
Its one reason why so many studies show Fox viewers to be the least informed, least knowledgeable...if they don't see/hear it on Fox it didn't exist/happen.
Lying is legal if it's *opinion;* with certain constraints. Constitutional law is a bit less specific when it comes to the 4th Estate and *news.* Or if there are Libel issues involved.
I'm betting us Dems have the legislative mojo necessary to craft a "Truth in News" law that could pass 1st Amendment muster. If we have a Dem Trifecta (POTUS + both houses of Congress) in '28, we need to get it done. Otherwise, we're going to become an Orbanized FOX-News-Nation, where there's only lies in the media, and nobody knows wtf is going on...
I’m with you Nubby, but have no confidence that the Democrats will not shoot themselves in the foot (or the head) before or after 2028. Examples from Biden: Day One, he signed an EO mandating “affirmative care” for transgender minors including surgery and handed Trump his infamous but devastating TV ad (“Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you”). Second example: open borders for 20 months because the left-wing Democrats never met an immigrant they didn’t like. With such Democratic activists warping policy, Republicans keep receiving free kicks. Bill Clinton (& Rahm Emanuel) were alive to this peril.
Remember that in the case where Fox called itself an entertainment channel, rather than a news channel, it was making the point that no reasonable person listening to it would really think it was a news channel. Which says a lot about your average MAGAt!
In 1987, the FCC, under Ronald Reagan, repealed the "Fairness Doctrine," a policy that required broadcasters to present balanced, contrasting viewpoints on controversial public issues.
Originally established by the FCC in 1949, the doctrine ensured that radio and television stations covered important, controversial issues in a balanced manner.
Reagan opposed the policy on First Amendment grounds, and his appointed FCC officials voted to eliminate it, arguing it was no longer necessary.
The repeal allowed for the rise of partisan talk radio (beginning with Rush Limbaugh in 1988) and contributed to the current polarized media landscape.
The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast television and radio, not to cable or print media, meaning its repeal did not directly affect cable news channels.
Though Congress attempted to codify the doctrine into law, Reagan vetoed the legislation.
Many people now get their "news" from social media. And more and more people "cut the cord", only stream entertainment through AppleTV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. Now if someone sold Apple on a good daily news show, some headway could be made.
I proposed new regulation/legislation on TV News Media in particular. It isn't a truth serum, but it certainly would provide transparency into the powerful influences that occur in the writing rooms of these companies. With that, we could adjust our consumption habits accordingly, the same way we do when we check a nutrition label and find our "snack" has 70 grams of sugar. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/a04ea851-5bda-4687-9db4-0059a7f7b74d
Murdoch would, as Rupert thinks he is a disgusting boor of a person, but they tried to tell the truth about Biden winning in 2020, and the viewers mostly deserted them. The bottom line is those viewers want the lies and propaganda, so Fox serves it to them.
I agree that Fox is partly to blame. I was just reading the comments from another substack I subscribe to and was dismayed to read a strongly worded comment about what a terrible president Biden was, mainly because he didn’t bow out sooner. This comment posted after a well written essay about the corruption in trump’s administration, the disastrous Iran situation, etc. There ensued a back and forth from many people lumping all Dems as “corrupt”, too old, needing an entirely new generation, blah, blah. Are these politically illiterate comments from purity seekers? Adherents to ageism? Russian bots trying to sow divisions? The almost 30% who still support trump? Yes Biden should have left earlier but his policies were sound and could have moved us in the right direction had we not taken a U-Turn in the election. And Professor Krugman’s points about Biden’s good economic policies being vilified are along the same lines. The purity, all or nothing, myopic attitude of too many people fills me with dread.
It is nearing election time, so the bots will start slagging the dems, in order to replicate the success they had with the 2024 election. They want to push the narrative "both-sides are the same" "your vote doesn't matter" etc. Anyone pushing that is an enemy of democracy, we saw what happens when voters stay home. Call out the liars, so others don't get swayed by them.
I don't believe if we didn't have Fox News and the right wing media everything will be peachy. They are giving their audience what it wants - "facts" and cherry picking that confirms their view of the world. It's a reinforcing cycle. More propaganda that makes these people feel good about themselves, more audience, more revenue. Remember when Fox wasn't Trumpy enough and these people flocked to Newsmax? They were getting a bigger hit with Newsmax.
It think it's naive to believe that if we can only get people to see facts and reason they will flock to our side. I'm also not immune. I get news from a lot of sources and I like to think I'm well-informed but I tune in to MS NBC to get comfort from people who have the same views. I read PK for a lot of the same reasons. I like to think I'm getting a point of view based on events and reality, but then again.
There will always be political and ideological bias in news. Which is apparently what the Founders intended? And Opinion is also perfectly OK. But when Opinion not borne out by facts--or in contradiction to it--is passed off as *news,* that's a problem.
The Founders made it pretty clear that the 4th Estate had a special and essential role in ensuring the survival of our form of government. But facts-free "news"--mainly but not exclusively from the Right--will only lead us to dictatorship and poverty.
I come from Europe. In "my" country the news was read every evening at 8 p.m. in about 20 minutes. Factual. Addionally every broadcaster had a program with back-ground stories. I was shocked when I moved to the US and saw the one hour "news shows" with two anchor who often thought they needed to be funny. Now "news"channels stream mainly shows with anchors who push an opinion. Usually right-wing because then facts do not matter as much. Facts are annoying because usually they are complicated.
I've read that FOX is on TVs in many public places--waiting rooms at dentist and medical offices, garages, airports, gyms, train stations, bars, restaurants, etc. Perhaps if you are a paying customer at one of these places you could request they switch the station or turn it off altogether.
Interestingly it has been very well received. I was in the dentist office (I live in FL in a very red area) with two other ladies, and I politely requested something more pleasant, the receptionist apologized, and complied, and the two ladies looked up from their phones and thanked me! They actually said they never thought to ask.
Exactly right, this thesis by Krugman only reinforces the fact that mainstream media (Fox News is still the number 1 news channel) controls the narrative and the minds of the voters to get them to vote against their own interests. Many of us have family that watch Fox News and witness this first hand. All these arguments Krugman laid out are not new and many of us made during the election. But to no avail, when the mindless masses are whipped into a frenzy over illegal immigrants and college loan subsidies, while the rich take us all for a ride.
No, actually, since, per McLuhan, the medium IS the message, the only way to compete is for Progressive billionaires to bite the bullet and take on the ongoing costs of maintaining a balanced national media environment.
The mainstream “liberal” media played a huge role in the distorted picture people were getting of Biden’s economy. They ignored or downplayed most of the evidence of the good economy but constantly hyped inflation stories, particularly about the price of gas and eggs, neither of which Biden could have done anything about. Gas prices had gone down during Covid because people were staying home but went up after Russia caused sanctions to be imposed by invading Ukraine, not because Biden was spending too much. And it’s not like Biden was going to farms infecting chickens with bird flu.
On the day in June 2024 that the World Bank announced that it was increasing its prediction of world economic growth, citing the strength of the US economy driving that unexpected growth, I was sure this would be a huge boost to Biden. Instead most of the media buried that story in back pages or just ignored it. The NYT chose to have yet another article about the price of eggs prominently placed on its front page. The WaPo buried that story in a back section. After it became clear that inflation was gradually lowering without that deep recession Larry Summers had claimed was necessary, the media switched to their “vibes” narrative.
The media also kept slamming Biden and Harris for not touting their accomplishments. When they did try to talk about economic accomplishments they were slammed for not being sympathetic to the struggles of average/“real” Americans. Apparently the media doesn’t think average people need more affordable child care, health care, education, or rising wages. Under Biden we had the lowest unemployment in over 50 years with record lows for African American men but that apparently isn’t something that benefits average folks, either. Unemployment for African Americans has gone up under Trump but that isn’t a big story.
As Dean Baker has dominated the media didn’t just distort their coverage of the economy, the also outright lied about it at times. For example the NYT claimed recent grads couldn’t find jobs when the truth was unemployment for recent years was at a 20 year low.
“Yes, the Media Lied About the Pre-Election Economy”
For decades, mainstream media, whether right-leaning or not, has exaggerated the role that presidents play in the direction of the economy, especially in the short-term. Incumbents brag if the economy is good; challengers attack if the economy is bad. Campaign coverage reports these claims uncritically and amplifies them (including by amplification of demonstrably false narratives) because they play into the "horse-race" angle, and that kind of reporting attracts viewers/readers (as opposed to, say, reporting on the baleful long-term consequences of Reagan-era tax policies, which bores people). The fact that many voters accept the premise that the president can be credited or blamed for the economy six months into his term (much less on "day one") is a consequence of decades of idiotic media coverage. In the short-term, the economy does what it was going to do, unless the president takes affirmative steps to screw it up (oh, wait).
Some of this is the Bully Pulpit effect. Presidents attract far more listenership than they merit. Trump has certainly turned this up to 11. I for one am considering cancelling my Atlantic subscription because even that magazine has perhaps 2/3 of its articles about Trump in some way and I frankly would like to hear far less about the man. As a matter of preserving the mental peace, I’d like to keep his mindshare down to no more than 10 minutes a week.
In defense of the Atlantic, I'm keeping my Atlantic subscription forever or as long as they up the good work and they have the long form journalism that you can't get anywhere. And there was that article about Best Restaurant Bread.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I'd like for Trump to become irrelevant and there might be the occasional article about how he's coping in prison, but he's President. His actions have consequences and he does have the stage whether we like it or not. We have to suffer through this unfortunately.
Biden was in an unusual situation because of Covid’s horrific effect on the economy just as Obama after the ‘08 meltdown. In both cases the US economy bounced back significantly better than other rich countries because both Obama and Biden spent while European countries doubled down on austerity. Government spending when an economy is depressed — Keynesian economics — still works.
The claim that Harris didn't "present a clear and coherent message" is still being repeated like a broken record with a slight change, "Democrats continue to fail to present a clear and coherent message". And if I never hear "Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" it will be too soon.
Democrats have a clear and coherent progressive message they could deliver, if they wanted to. It would resonate with all of the low income, Hispanic and Black young voters that Trump picked up.
This is one of those cases where like Reagan said, in a choice between a true progressive and a fake one, the true one will win every time.
The problem for Democrats is they are addicted to campaign money. The donorsphere, the set of people with enough money to throw away on politics, is fundamentally uninterested in paying their employees more. So they feel they can’t go to an economically left campaign. This leaves social leftism (which the donors don’t care about) for them for virtue signalling. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population actively enraged by that stuff and it isn’t doing them any favors.
If Mamdani is any indication I think they might try some old fashioned economically progressive policies. Milquetoast with a liberal coating of gender reassignment for children is just not working for them.
Campaign money does matter. Musk spent tens of millions in PA alone. Controlling the narrative matters. Progressives need to understand that. I am progressive, but the idea of "my way, or the highway" is unfortunately a pitch that dividing a party can somehow win an election. WE are facing a crisis in America. Solidarity will make or break this country. Winning is everything! Losing,,, cancels all the ideals of progressive politics. I wish it were not so, but realistically one goal supersedes all others. A more progressive message is a winner, but to make rules based on how "progressive" people are is a divider.
BOTH parties are addicted to campaign money. Congressmen spend literally *half* of each two-year term fundraising. There's like a 94% correlation with victory in a House race to which candidate raised the most money.
To paint this as a Dem issue is extremely myopic.
Having said that, Republicans are simply excellent at messaging, with fresh talking points distributed to their politicians and Influencers daily. And RW media nearly 100% supports this. The Dems have nothing like this.
Orban proved that buying up and consolidating media was an essential tool to hiding corruption and maintaining power perpetually.
Citizens United forced the parties to go after the big donors. It was the John Roberts Court that set this up, not the parties themselves.
I disagree about Republicans haing "fresh talking points". They campaign on the same issues over and over: Deficit, racism and abortion. I see your point, though.
No, you can't argue Clinton "might" have won the popular vote. She won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. Did Trump cheat? NOOOO, Trump would NEVER cheat /s.
We should also mention Biden's child tax credit, which wiped out much of childhood poverty in the country. Because the media would not report on it, it expired. I recall a CNN report on a family with twelve children complaining about the price of milk. It never mentioned that this family must have been in much better condition because of the tax credit.
Biden was a good Potus. I liked him a lot and felt that the criticisms he got were based more on the fact that he was so very white looking, more so than his 'bad' policies. Biden did a lot of good things!
I was about to write my own comment to Krugman’s very welcome piece, but you said it all. FOX commentators mislead. I expect that. But the injustices perpetrated by mainstream media drive me nuts. It’s as if everyone is on the take.
And there was always the 'imminent recession' when President Biden was in office. Not a peep about that, now, even though it's a lot more likely.
I canceled all my mainstream media subscriptions over their biased reporting, starting with "but her emails" when Hillary Clinton was running for president. Not a word, though, about the draft-dodging, tax-evading, failed businessman, rapist, and pedophile.
The now famous Ipsos poll of Trump voters in Nov. '24 found that 85% of them get some/most/all of their news from FOX News. And that 80% believed FOX lies, including the one that the "Biden economy" was *already* in recession.
You are correct that the media lied about the economy. The question is why? My opinion is the NYT and mainstream media did not want an economy nor a president that benefits the 90%. They are comfortable with the economy that redistributes to the top ten percent. Voters need to become educated about the economic policies that benefit all Americans. The Democratic Party also did a poor job of getting the message to voters.
The GOP is simply superb at messaging. And with an entire media ecosystem at their disposal to lie about...literally everything, they're very good at seizing power. Which is also why conservative politicians lie so brazenly--like Trump in a national debate claiming Haitians were eating the Dogs and Cats.
But like in Orban's Hungary, Conservatives are lousy at actually governing. Corruption, incompetence, expensive wars, deficit spending, and impoverishment--of the bottom 95%--are what results.
You are correct the NYT is the paper of the ultrawealthy and they want to keep the status quo. Here is a quote from their editor Joe kahn: top NY Times editor: ‘covering the next Trump presidency is going to be awesome’ Fasten your seat belts. If Trump wins again, the New York Times will be committed to covering every aspect of that story as it unfolds. It would be, as our reporting shows, a disruptive Presidency if he wins. We will have a full-time job covering the implications of that. And we’ll need a team of people who are geared up, as in the first term, but even more so, for a very disruptive presence in the White House. And what we’ll do is we’ll show up and we’ll do our jobs."
Agreed! I had massive arguments with my 'liberal' Democratic friends, and I'm a life-long Democrat! I also taught Graduate level architecture for over 35 years. I know the effect it has on HIRING decisions when you get a kid who comes in for an interview, and the first thing they want to tell you is: Their pronouns. The kiss of death. Un-employable. A fact that all my liberal friends scream at me for stating the truth. Pronouns were part of the un-doing of the Democratic Party and their ability to win elections!
Decline happened to the Sierra Club when they moved more into social issues and the pronoun bit. Damn, countering eco-dunce Donald and his rapacious industrial cohorts is a helluva lot more important than pronouns.
First: Corporate news organizations, regardless of orientation, are in the business of selling what they write. If people won't read it, news organizations are likely to change what they write. The alternative is public funded news, and its hardly a coincidence that our president is trying to stamp out the CPB, PBS and NPR. To be an informed reader requires reading from multiple sources, which far too many Americans simply don't do.
Secondly, unemployment statistics that include the Covid era make clear that college graduates did in fact experience greater difficulty finding a job and experienced higher rates of unemployment during the period roughly 2020-2022. But so did every other employment group. Were the comments by college graduates looking for a job justified? Relative to certain other groups of unemployed? No, but relative to other college graduates? I think I'll give the NYT a pass on this one..
As for rising wages v. rising costs, while the argument that wages have risen in concert with rising costs is largely accurate, it frequently lacks context. For low wage workers, the key components of rising costs, e.g., food, gas, housing, etc., are critical as the wage increases they receive are not based on the components of cost that affect them most. Likewise, a certain level of wage increase will affect low and high wage earners differently. High wage earners not only receive more dollars for any given level of wage increase, but their higher wage levels also give them a greater ability to absorb the increases in key cost components than is the case for low wage workers. As a result, the effect of any given level of wage increase may be perceived differently by wage group.
For what its worth, I read Dean Baker's article and generally agree with what he had to say. However, his comments seem to suffer from some of the same criticism that he accords the NYT and others.
Well written, and so very accurate, the NYT had half a floor dedicated to finding negative stories about Biden. Those are not the actions of a dedicated journalistic organization. They sold us out, because they lost so many subscriptions because under Biden we had competent leadership and quit doom-scrolling, so they tried to manufacture crises. Also Biden wouldn't give them the interview they felt entitled to (nor would I if they gossiped about my son like a fish-wife which should be beneath them, but obviously wasn't.) also the editor Joe Kahn said "defending democracy was not his job."
Agreed. Our MSM has sustained a total moral collapse, just like the rest of the country. But remember YAHOO (You Always Have Other Options)? When I post this cartoon, it may not result in systemic changes. But it’s satisfying to know that like-minded people relate to it. It’s even more satisfying to know that, somewhere far far away, ketchup is being flung. That Mel Brooks-inspired approach is enough. For now. https://theweek.com/cartoons/674301/political-cartoon-obama-trump-big-shoes-fill
That's what I was thinking as I read the column. Fox was created by the greedy rich moocher class with intent to use its propaganda to aid in turning the United States into a plutocracy/kleptocracy that benefits wealthy white men at the expense of everyone else. I wish there was some way to stop the outrage-inciting falsehoods of Fox and its ilk without violating the First Amendment.
Independent Media is doing that. But I fear the people who plug into the Independents are not the problem to begin with. So many Americans just don't want to pay attention to anything beyond Monday night football. The people who comment here care! They are concerned, 1/3 of this country is focused on marketing induced consumption, not the fate of democracy.
It wouldn’t work. In some cases they don’t know the truth. In fact if you were able to look at our public discourse through the lens of the year 3000, most of what is said would be obvious fantasy and nonsense.
The way to shut it down would be to buy the business and then exercise some editorial control. You don’t even need to shut it down. It could still be a conservative news outlet, just a truthful and fair one.
Part of the problem with conservative media is there is not actually a free to watch sensible channel. There is rabid and there is raving looney. The WSJ which is known for its occasional (though hardly consistent) flashes of reality is unfortunately too expensive for more people and it isn’t on TV.
I propose convening a brain-trust of top Dem legal minds. And letting them come up with some sort of "Truth in News" legislation. That can pass 1st Amendment muster.
It could be as simple as loosening libel law to be more like the UK. Or at the very least requiring visual media to be like newspapers, and have separate sections for News and Opinion.
If we can't get it done, our future is Orbanization.
I'm unable to watch Fox. Oh, it's available on my streaming service, but I value my sanity. If I watched Fox, I'd probably end up shooting my TV (of course, I'd need a gun) like Elvis did repeatedly, what with his large disposable income.
"Which makes me wonder how much of Trump2's ongoing hostility to Electro is him following the the dictates of our Petro Barons."
That's a pretty easy question to answer...almost all of it. The oil sheiks give him what he wants - lots of money - and they get what they want - anti-renewable energy policies and military and political protection for their oil profits.
Qatar is getting its money's worth from that winged $400 million bribe it gave Trump.
The part that's not driven by Trump's greed is driven by how Trump lives in the past. All his impressions about energy are mired in the '70s. So he thinks that renewable sources of energy don't work any better than they did 50 years ago and that that will always be so.
Cheny and Dubya--like a lot of GOP pol's--were oil men. And Cheney had a famous Oil-CEO-only retreat in their run up to the Iraq War. That we *still* don't know about.
There has been next to no leaking by these guys. Lots of speculation. But no hard proof on what Cheney was offering. Same is true right now with the US and Gulf Oil Barons.
I fail to understand how Fox News stays on tv? One day last week there was a photo of a man in his late 20’s holding a sign that something to the effect of: I don’t care what you say, I’m staying with Trump. As a grandmother I’m certainly old enough to understand that there are people who will believe anything but when the truth is handed to you on a silver platter and you rebuff it what more can anyone do?I also find it exhausting to (at the very least on a weekly basis) constantly being forced to remind people of the same issues over and over again as half the country does not possess the ability to remember the simplest of things like common sense?
And the ashes micturated upon. For all the damage they have done in tearing families, and our country apart, with their lies and deliberate propaganda.
In '24 Democrats were in turmoil with Biden forced out and Harris anointed in the proverbial smoke-filled back room. Trump was widely viewed as better for the economy and everyone hated "Bidenomics."
Trump was also seen as a peacemaker (Ha, Ha!). It was a perfect storm and Harris lost every swing state. Looks like they might do better in the midterms if we still have free and fair elections then.
It sounds like the election strategists did their job well then. This alone does not voter fraud make. You may be sure they are dialing in their ad dollars to tilt key markets just enough to get the tiny margin of victory to get all the marbles for the state.
Many decades ago, states decided to manipulate the election process by making all of their votes go to the +1% victor in the race. Now the strategy allows the states to be manipulated to great gain.
If the president was decided by the national popular vote we would not have this gamesmanship. Every vote would count.
Whatever the justification our founding fathers may have had for an Electoral College to prevent an unwanted presidency, it was proved wrong most clearly in 2024.
If there is a campaign for national popular vote elections for president, I haven’t heard about it. What better time than now?
Many, not enough, states have already passed a measure which commits them to casting all of their ballots in favor of the winner of the popular vote. If states representing 50%+1 of the electoral college pass this measure we will instantly and constitutionally in effect switch over to popular vote.
Though there will still be the nonsense about ratification of the results in Congress.
He pulled out 90% of our combat forces. With almost no casualties, due to a secret deal he struck with the Taliban, that denied the Afghan Army US air support and logistics in return for them not attacking US forces.
Without air support and supplies, the Taliban slaughtered the Afghan Army, killing over 60,000 in about a year of fighting.
Trump left the 10% of US troops who remained as a poison pill for Biden. Who FOX News then pilloried in hundreds of segments as a traitor, idiot and coward.
It wasn't just Fox. ALL major media outlets were constantly attacking President Biden and pushing rightwing complaints about the economy, and most of their opinionators were visibly disappointed that they weren't able to will a recession into being before the election.
They also pounced on every stutter or gaffe made by Biden, and the fact that that was part of a corporate plan to destroy Biden and get Trump back in office is now beyond debate as we watch all corporate media studiously ignore Trump's worsening dementia and growing instability.
And let us not forget their counterpart in print the NYT with their half of an entire floor dedicated to slagging Joe Biden. Lucien Truscott explained it.
"Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again? The Times was down on Clinton for months because of her so-called email scandal that wasn’t a scandal at all, and when Russian intelligence leaked Democratic Party emails through WikiLeaks in the fall of 2016, reading the Times you would think that each and every DNC email that nobody bothered reading was a smoking gun. None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president.
There are no scandals with the name Biden attached to them, unless you consider the lies Russian spies supplied the so-called impeachment committee with. So The New York Times has apparently devoted half a floor in its Eighth Avenue headquarters to a search for bad news about Biden, and then they reserve a space nearly every day above the fold on the front page for whatever grain of grim garbage the Biden hunters have managed to come up with. They’re probably working on a story on how Biden is losing the pro-choice vote as we speak, while pointing out the wild success of Trump’s “move to the middle” on abortion with “centrist” voters.
If you’re getting off the subway anywhere near Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, hold your nose. There’s something fishy at the New York Times."
Balderdash. The big three TV networks, plus CNN and MSNBC, have TEN TIMES the viewership of Fox News. And we all know what their preference and patter was. You're going to have to try a little harder to explain why people didn't like 9% inflation.
What were the profit margins of the oil companies doing? We still hear fantasies about supply chain problems. A pandemic was a cause for this inflation, but not the only cause.
Broadcast evening newscasts average 5-8 million viewers nightly. But that is a one-off for that day, because then the other programming for that evening starts. Fox "news" hits 2-3 million in prime time. But Fox and similar channels go on the whole day, hour after hour, tambouring their way of seeing things.
Fox "news" gets 60% of people watching cable newscasters, with 2-3 Million viewers in prime time. But broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC) still beat that thanks to local affiliates, together totaling over 8 Million.
ABC alone gets over 8 million. Add up ABC, CBS and NBC, throw in CNN and MSNBC -- all of which are reliably anti-Trump and pro-whomever is opposing him -- and it's something like five times the viewers. The previous commenter's point is well taken about the rest of the programming, but Fox News's is still a relatively small audience in the context of the voting public. And CNN and MSNBC are doing the same thing on behalf of "the resistance." And we haven't even mentioned the ladies of The View, who pull in an average of close to 3 million viewers every day for their political diatribes. Or Colbert and Kimmel. And on and on.
Yes. But Fox"news" and similar channels go on all day long, hour after hour. Especially in the evening they are full blast angry. Anchors cannot be bothered with info-gathering, there is only opinion-blathering. Many people use their TV as something akin to digital wall-paper, paying not a lot of attention, but still picking up a sound-bite here and there.
The View, Colbert, Kimmel, etc. are acquired tastes. They preach to the choir.
ABC’s evening newscast is currently the most‑watched of the big three wih 8.4-8.7 Million viewers, CBS evening news has typically around 4.2–4.3 Million viewers, and NBC nightly news gets jut above 6.9 million viewers. (So the numbers I found earlier were too low - thanks for mentioning that!)
Yeah, how the Tiffany Network has fallen from the days of Cronkite or even Rather. As far as "full-blast angry "is concerned I don't think Fox has a monopoly on that; the ladies of The View, Larry O'Donnell, Joy Reid etc get pretty worked up on the reg. And I still can't believe Stephen Colbert didn't get taken off the air after calling the President of the United States Putin's "c**k holster." The point is that there are an awful lot of voices that are countering the Fox News narrative; it's hardly a monolith even if it does get better ratings. Maybe the other networks should think about expanding their audience rather than "preaching to the choir."
Unions + worker-focused government policy = an environment where Americans and EU citizens have thrived. Those halcyon days of working folks affording homes, cars, etc are not gone. They have been yanked away by government policy that favors upward distribution of wealth and devastation to collective bargaining. Much of this negative momentum was/is driven by the R party and its amplifiers. Pretty simple. What’s complex is not the societal and governmental solutions; rather, it’s the political. Many in the U.S. are ignorant as to how government works and have been indoctrinated to believe “gummint” is wasteful and stupid, and unions ruined America. Quite the opposite has been true.
Respectfully, I am a bit older and remember when an ambitious blue collar worker could build a new home, with his stay-at-home mom spending her time raising a family, have a nice vacation at the lake, and still save for retirement: single worker for profit. That is gone.
My father had an 8th grade education and worked in a textile mill and with overtime supported himself, me , my mom and grandma. He bought and paid off a house in 11 years, we always had a 3 to 6 year old car and with my mom and grandma cooking mostly from scratch were surely never hungry.
With all due respect, I’m a bit older and never knew anyone like that. My mother, my grandmothers — all worked. No vacations at the lake. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I’m saying the good old days weren’t all that good for everyone.
When I speak to people in the Trump voter demographic these days, they seem not to realise that they've spent decades now voting to shift laws and policies towards being "business friendly" and reducing worker rights and protections. They are often focused on blaming younger workers, immigrants etc. and don't seem to understand that the "worker friendly" policies they've voted to remove were significant contributors to those golden days of the past you mention.
I'm over 65, and I remember well working for a company for many years, getting my yearly evaluation, yearly raises and promoted from within, with company health benefits, a 401k and retirement benefits. It used to pay to stay. Then companies realized they could get full-time performance out of an employee but save all the benefits costs by working them 32 hours a week - just under the true "Full time employee" mark. Then it collapsed from there.
But as I mentioned below, the American Dream days of Dad at work, Mom at home raising the family and going on vacations was largely for whites. African Americans were making great social and economic strides back then, but were still marginalized, and rather obviously, too.
If we could get the average person to understand this, every year would be a blue wave. Seriously Democrats are perceived as everything the Republicans actually are. So if you are out there bashing Dems, you are part of the problem.
It’s pretty hard to square this statement: “it isn’t consistent with complaints about huge, widespread declines in overall purchasing power” with an annual COLA wage increase at 2.5-3% (I’m a state employee — no bonuses or stock options for me!) with inflation that’s been at that rate or higher for years. I AM poorer every year. Gas prices are the highest they’ve been in my life (and they were pretty dang high in 2008!), housing costs have increased 50% since 2019, a loaf of bread is $9! Of course the economy is worse now. You’d be blind to think otherwise.
Is talking about wages alone good enough to address the K shape economy? High wage earners may have lower rise in wage levels during the Biden years, but what about their passive income and capital gains from investments? Lower wage workers typically have none or very little of these income sources. Would this also cause bigger income/wealth disparities and hence weakened general consumer sentiments?
I think there is a big difference between 'high wage earners' and the extremely wealthy who actually don't get their money from wages at all. I am guessing that that is the territory into which Prof Krugman is planning to take us, as he discusses why people's sense of the economy actually has surprisingly less to do with income or standard measures of purchasing power than we tend to assume. That's obviously a critical issue, so I'm really looking forward to reading what he has to say, especially since he is someone who is both immensely knowledgable and deeply kind and ethical.
I'd also like to see charts and discussion not just about INCOME but NET WORTH. Isn't the point of the K-shaped meme that the rich get richer while the poor get deeper in debt? With ever more of the nation's wealth in the hands of the top 1%/.01%/.0001% ...? Which has very large implications not just for public vibes but for actual politics and power.
Thank you for your comment. I was commenting on the content of this post. What Professor Krugman will write in the future about the subject is something that I can't speculate or comment on, his knowledge, kindness and ethics notwithstanding.
I completely agree here. Metrics of inflation dont count healthcare, college, and other volatile metrics. If we look at the earlier era or Biden era getting .5% or 1.5% ahead of inflation matters very little compared to the big ticket items not in the inflation. One just needs to look at the ever expanding debt of the bottom 50% and their trivial assets to see while this 'vibecession' persists.
Yes, so many large and volatile costs beyond just housing. Healthcare certainly affects everyone - expensive, confusing, and often is unpredictable for the individual as to what, when, and where. Cars have also gotten very expensive to obtain, maintain, and keep gassed up. Utilities fluctuate depending on type, and bills are going up as climate change keeps ac working harder or knocks out unusual locations like an ice storm in Texas.
I also think the way we do pricing in America skews how we perceive things. We never see the actual *cost*. At a restaurant, the food supposedly costs X amount, but we have to tip at the end of the meal because the server isn’t really earning a proper wage. At the store, items have prices, but the cost varies based on tax. I live in a metro that doesn’t just have various taxes between its cities and counties, but it also straddles a state line with very different taxes. Kansas recently phased out tax on groceries. Missouri is trying to phase out income tax and replace it with sales and use tax. So depending on where you are and what you are buying, who even knows what tax is added at checkout.
The problem is wages are largely set by boardrooms not the government. Elections don’t matter for this stuff, or rather they might but it is $1:1vote and happen at annual shareholders meetings by only those poised to directly profit by screwing you over. You are not even allowed in the boardroom.
A solution would be to give workers a vote in these elections. We could for example take all of the private equity and institutional funds shares that literally can not vote (e.g. your 401k) and turn those proxies over to employees.
As it is, since somewhere between half to 2/3 of all shares fall into this category, someone with a 10% holding in the company might hold 30% voting share in the company, delivering a sizable, undeserved and unpaid for subsidy for the wealthiest, so they can help make sure your paycheck gradually decreases relative to inflation year over year, until finally all the money is theirs!
This is how and why you are getting fleeced. You think politics and government is the answer — look at the birdie! — all while your pocket is picked in the board room before you even get your paycheck.
The problem isn't Biden versus Trump. It's the shoveling of money to the top that accelerated during Reagan and has persisted since. We have finally reached the point where people are feeling it and not at all happy. I suspect social media has had a lot to do with it. But yes, it is plain now that people increasingly realize they were duped. Trump left us worse off by his incompetence in managing COVID and he is doing it again with his incompetence across the entire spectrum of presidential responsibilities. America will be worse off when he leaves, and hopefully a Democrat will win and can set about trying to fix things (again) while Republicans do all they can to obstruct it. Meanwhile, despite being raised in a solidly middle class household, my kids are having a hard time getting their first step up the ladder. Good jobs seem scarce and hard to get. AI is threatening to pull the rungs out from under them. People are indeed unhappy with the prospects, and rightfully so. The oligarchs that run this country have no intention of sharing the bounty they've been collecting, and people and communities damaged by AI will not be helped, the same as happened with the last round of globalization.
Unfortunately, I think many people have a short memory. This is why we have the orange stain back in the oval (gilded?) office. Americans are too fickle and were willing to self sabotage against the Democrats for not bringing change fast enough.
I think it was obvious for those who put in effort to make sense of the messy reality, but with the lack of mainstream media coverage to amplify the narrative then it was difficult for ordinary non-economists to set the record straight with other ordinary folks.
Maybe part of the blame goes to Biden too for not figuring out how to tell the story in a way the media would reinforce, instead of only repeating assertions about what the data showed. I don't want to be unfair to him though - the absolute lion's share of the blame goes to Fox News for misleading the public about the hard data in bad faith. But still I wish Biden had found some better way to counter that narrative.
For example, even just the other day I tried bringing up the point Paul Krugman is making that I felt the record is not fair enough to Biden, and how a lot of the inflation in his term was caused by COVID, and less by his particular intervention to give us savings cushions to deal with COVID. I got push back. Despite a cordial debate, I lost or reached something of an impasse. I had no idea how to back up what I was saying with enough hard data - compared to the guy I was debating who could simply repeat Fox News talking points, which constitute the prevailing wisdom and narrative. I wish I had been able to point to Paul Krugman's article in response.
Maybe one thing the Democratic party lacks in setting the record straight is enough infrastructural support to recruit non-experts in to the task of amplifying their record. Maybe it feels distasteful, as it would be hard to distinguish that type of messaging approach from one of pure propaganda, but I believe there is a way to do it that is still beholden to truth.
My observation is that a great proportion of the people in the country do not pay close attention to political news, but they buy groceries and gas. They have an idea of what they should pay, perhaps from some key earlier point in their lives. When those prices rise significantly, they feel it and are upset. Of course, the gullible do believe what Fox News propagandizes, and that fact is important for older, less sophisticated voters. The educated, learned do pay attention and do know how on the right track was Biden. Put simply, to elect the next Democratic leaders who must void everything Trump and Republican have done to destroy our country, and to try to start the reforms for "never again," the biggest campaigning point must be prices and inflation.
Americans always go for the flashy, new kid on the block and ignore the plodding, quiet type. It happens in movies, music, writing, sports, merchandising, and politics. Joe was a fine president and will go down in history as such. Donald, no so much.
I think Hisotry will reflect that Biden in fact was a very good president. He was handed a train wreck from Trump with a COVID Pandenmic that near killed Trump due to his ignorance in not listening to the smartest doctors in the World. I attribute Trump living through COVID as to God and Satan neither one want that P0S. I have an entire family that to this day still has not had a COVID vaccine because Tucker told them not too. I watched people here in Alabama making more money than they have ever made whine about the economy when there were Help Wanted signs on every business. Now you can't buy a job and they have nothing to say. We have a good 30% of the Country that is devoid of facts and only see what they are told to see by the people that validate their racism because when you get to the bottom of it all, that is the only thing the Reich has to offer and for more than half of us, it is not something we want. Very few of these Trumputians are ever going to leave Trump and our best option is to recruit New Voters because we have near half the country doesn't vote and if you recruit them to Truth and Facts when they are young, they will be on the side of Truth and Facts their entire lives. Maybe then we can rid ourselves of this Murdock/Limbaugh Hate Crowd.
If average Americans hadn't been made vulnerable through 40 years of trickle down economics and Republicans deregulating everything and refusing to guarantee healthcare and pensions and basically anything that helps people maybe this could have been different. We shouldn't be celebrating 250 years as a country but mourning what we've become under Trump and 50 years of Republican lies and screwing everyone but the affluent in every possible way.
While it is nice to think in contrapositives, saying that Harris would win the election is a hollow victory. Anyone with half a brain should have known that Trump was going to be terrible, and he proves it almost daily.
This is a minor point and you kind of allude to this in your post, but are wages a reliable measure for people at the top? I’m under the impression that many of these people skip wages in favor of stock or other strategies that help them avoid taxes? Just curious.
I don't believe that these are just "misperceptions of The Biden Economy"! These "mispections" were the direct result of a well coordinated effort by the wealthy Right-wing corporate media that favors inequality in favor of their own interests!
I think the mood of the working and middle-class is a result of "financial burnout" or "economic exhaustion." It happens when people have been struggling and using credit to compensate for a long time and see no end in sight. It's like driving an old car "forever" and paying for expensive repairs because it's impossible even to buy a better used car.
When it can no longer be repaired, and there is no way to get to work, things get much worse faster. The feeling of impending doom doesn't go away. I think maybe only people who have experienced this way of living, with no light at the end of the tunnel, can understand the tension felt every morning when a worker turns the key in the ignition to see if the car will start and take them to work (or door dashing). "Official statistics" can't explain away the reality for those at the bottom of the K-Shaped economy. They're not okay.
The longevity stats that we don't live as long as other comparable wealthy countries apply to those who live every day under that burden, not to the well-off. That kind of stress affects longevity.
I read about the Gilgo Beach killer. His victims were mainly women with a broken marriage or escaping another difficult situation, who could not make ends meet. They advertised themselves on Graigs-list, selling "the one thing of value they still had". It made me immensely sad - and angry. Women should be better protected financially and otherwise.
Not to be troll-ish, but I reiterate my point from last week: all this analysis overlooks the people like me.
I'm not low wage, I'm not an oligarch. I am a well-educated, middle class entrepreneur, a small business owner.
Whether I'm squeezed by a vibe or a hard stat, the fact remains that my customer base consists of only a tiny group of highly affluent customers oblivious to price changes while the vast bulk of my clients can no longer afford me in the same way they did before.
My income has risen slightly since Trump 45, but my costs have become insane, my lifestyle has diminished, and all the pretty charts in the world don't reflect that. I'm all in for the gig workers getting a big bump, but their experiences don't reflect the reality for the professional working class, which is also a big part of America.
I led with I'm middle class, I now feel like I am hanging onto that moniker by my rapidly breaking fingernails.
RW media--especially FOX News--was a significant factor in inflaming American anger at inflation under Biden, running hundreds of segments on how terrible it was, how everyone was getting screwed, etc. Despite our inflation levels being pretty much the lowest in world at the time.
If it had been Trump in the Oval instead, no doubt FOX would've run hundreds of segments instead on how much *higher* inflation was in every other country. And that we should thank our lucky stars for such a divinely anointed 4D business genius as POTUS, who though his masterful abilities single-handedly kept inflation low.
And as Trump's stupid Iran War pushes gas and diesel prices ever higher, Biden's IRA--expanding our Electro-stack industries and infrastructure--will be reappreciated for the sensible and necessary policy it still is. Which makes me wonder how much of Trump2's ongoing hostility to Electro is him following the the dictates of our Petro Barons.
FOX news is a huge problem - it reaches masses of people who believe everything they say - Biden was the worst president ever - his economy was the worst - illegal immigration of criminals was the worst!
The people who voted for Trump don't read columns like this one, they rely on FOX for all their news and they are being thoroughly misled.
It's sadly a good thing that Trump is performing so poorly - I hope that at least some of the viewers will turn away from that station.
Unless the Dems have a veto-proof majority in '28, and can pass some sort of "Truth in News" law, or somesuch, the fabricated nonsense from FOX will continue to spew.
Last week there was a poll that showed that only 58% of conservatives who *don't* watch FOX approved of the new Trump-Epstein war; compared to 83% of conservatives who do.
You may not need new "truth in news" legislation... just diligently apply the laws that constrain the concentration of media ownership... and fund PBS so there is a mix of motivations as to what makes news.
The Fairness Doctrine was repealed by Reagan's FCC in 1987, during his second term. Bill Clinton had nothing to do with it.
Every statement they made was incorrect, he is confusing the fairness doctrine with the Glass Steagal act is all I can figure.
Good. It was a stupid law , and would be impossible to enforce today with the rise of podcasts , social media...etc
No, the Fairness Doctrine was killed under Reagan.
Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine, (which needed updating because it didn't cover cable news which is why Fox propaganda channel is able to lie with impunity) and Reagan fast-tracked Murdoch's citizenship so he could own Fox. Roger Ailes, Nixon's media guy dreamt up Fox news because they saw the value in Russian propaganda and wished to create it here. https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created
Clinton got rid of the Glass-Steagal act. Which also needed updating.
IMHO. The FOX technique was perfected, arguably, by Putin’s crew. We have been transformed while we were distracted by shiny objects. What we have now is a new “delivery of news” world. Yes, yes: free press. But in my humble opinion, we need to do the hard work of legislating to deal with it. And for that we need to have people in Congress who are capable of writing good law. (Not Joe Blow the successful businessperson.)
My guess is the average viewer of Fox News in 2024 would have absolutely no idea that Covid-era inflation was significantly higher in Europe than it was in the U.S. – inflation actually broke over 10% in Europe.
Hard to blame that on President Biden, so just don’t mention it! Talk about how bad the crime is in New York City instead, which is actually at 60-year lows.
https://lbo-news.com/2025/03/03/nyc-murder-count-revisiting-old-lows/
https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
"Talk about how bad the crime is in New York City instead, which is actually at 60-year lows."
MS-Now, and to a lesser extent other MSM outlets did just that, pushing back on the FOX News narrative that Biden Economy Crime was at historic highs--instead of historic lows. But during the post-Covid inflation spike, Biden Admin made the stupid mistake of saying that inflation wasn't that bad.
Instead they should've had Jen Psaki have daily press briefings covering how much *worse* inflation was in Germany, England, France, Italy, Poland, Japan, Turkey, China, etc., etc. Covering a new country every day. To keep driving the point home, and forming effective counterprogramming to FOX bullshit.
Trump just ignored Congress and went on his way by Executive Order letting the Supreme Court decide whether or not his actions were legal. That's one way of governing.
His Supreme Court. Empty seats on private jets.....
Roger Ailes, whose brainchild Fox propaganda channel was, was inspired by the Kremlin broadcasts, and realized it could be duplicated here.
I think polls should routinely report Republican opinion in two segments - those who get their 'news' from Fox and its ilk, and those who rely on mainstream media.
Is mainstream media still reliable? Russia calls it's news service "mainstream".
That's actually happening much more regularly.
Fox is MSM you dumbass
Legally, Fox doesn’t call itself a news network; it explicitly calls itself an entertainment network. We’ll need some other way to mute them.
The First Amendment is pretty clear. No matter what Fox calls itself, we are not going to be able to pass laws that compel it to be more truthful. Lying isn't illegal and can't constitutionally be made illegal. As Fox found to its woe, there are a few situations in which this is not the case - such as when your lies defame someone. (Ka-ching!) There are other categories of speech that can be constrained such as, e.g., making threats against someone, or committing a fraud or perjury (lying under oath), etc. But any law to the effect that you just can't lie to the public just ain't going to pass Constitutional muster.
That's the problem: Lying is legal in the US. Who knew? Caveat Emptor. They should teach this in the 6th grade.
They don’t so much lie (although they do at times) as present very selective stories.
It's a mix. Sometimes they lie outright. The "People are saying..." FOX byline, is a tell when they've just made something up; like the dogs and cats in Ohio lede. Or that we've been at war with Iran since 1979.
Or they use video and stills from different news stories in different times and places, and pass them off as current coverage. Which happened a lot during the George Floyd protests.
Or they 98% fail to cover newsworthy content, like FOX has done by almost completely ignoring all Jeffrey Epstein scandal coverage.
Or they take something obscure like Critical Race Theory--a grad school course even 99.8% of grad students had never even heard of, and pretend it's used to race-shame white kids in every public school nationally.
I've long believed that what Fox doesn't report is as damaging as what they do "report."
Its one reason why so many studies show Fox viewers to be the least informed, least knowledgeable...if they don't see/hear it on Fox it didn't exist/happen.
Lying is legal if it's *opinion;* with certain constraints. Constitutional law is a bit less specific when it comes to the 4th Estate and *news.* Or if there are Libel issues involved.
I'm betting us Dems have the legislative mojo necessary to craft a "Truth in News" law that could pass 1st Amendment muster. If we have a Dem Trifecta (POTUS + both houses of Congress) in '28, we need to get it done. Otherwise, we're going to become an Orbanized FOX-News-Nation, where there's only lies in the media, and nobody knows wtf is going on...
I’m with you Nubby, but have no confidence that the Democrats will not shoot themselves in the foot (or the head) before or after 2028. Examples from Biden: Day One, he signed an EO mandating “affirmative care” for transgender minors including surgery and handed Trump his infamous but devastating TV ad (“Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you”). Second example: open borders for 20 months because the left-wing Democrats never met an immigrant they didn’t like. With such Democratic activists warping policy, Republicans keep receiving free kicks. Bill Clinton (& Rahm Emanuel) were alive to this peril.
They should HAVE to display and label themselves in every way as "Fox Entertainment News" with a "not an actual journalism program" underneath it.
And that should have to be in the crawl for ten seconds of every minute of broadcast.
Remember that in the case where Fox called itself an entertainment channel, rather than a news channel, it was making the point that no reasonable person listening to it would really think it was a news channel. Which says a lot about your average MAGAt!
They've actually successfully used that defense in at least three lawsuits.
Fox propaganda channel would be more accurate.
Buy the network. Exert managerial control. It will be expensive since viewership will crash but that is the way.
There’s a bunch of imitators!
Especially when they get sued over their firehose of lies, and propaganda.
In 1987, the FCC, under Ronald Reagan, repealed the "Fairness Doctrine," a policy that required broadcasters to present balanced, contrasting viewpoints on controversial public issues.
Originally established by the FCC in 1949, the doctrine ensured that radio and television stations covered important, controversial issues in a balanced manner.
Reagan opposed the policy on First Amendment grounds, and his appointed FCC officials voted to eliminate it, arguing it was no longer necessary.
The repeal allowed for the rise of partisan talk radio (beginning with Rush Limbaugh in 1988) and contributed to the current polarized media landscape.
The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast television and radio, not to cable or print media, meaning its repeal did not directly affect cable news channels.
Though Congress attempted to codify the doctrine into law, Reagan vetoed the legislation.
Many people now get their "news" from social media. And more and more people "cut the cord", only stream entertainment through AppleTV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. Now if someone sold Apple on a good daily news show, some headway could be made.
Social Media does not employ competent courageous journalists. It's algorithms promote engagement not analysis or critical thought.
58% who agree with Trump killing American protestors , gas prices over $4 a gallon, and Trump as the AI Christ. What is wrong with these people?
That the non watchers number is still so high is mind numbing.
I proposed new regulation/legislation on TV News Media in particular. It isn't a truth serum, but it certainly would provide transparency into the powerful influences that occur in the writing rooms of these companies. With that, we could adjust our consumption habits accordingly, the same way we do when we check a nutrition label and find our "snack" has 70 grams of sugar. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/a04ea851-5bda-4687-9db4-0059a7f7b74d
We got rid of that in the 80's. It would be impossible to do now because of Social media
These numbers would seem intuitive, but thank you for showing that they actually are true, not just intuitive!
Don't confuse me with facts; my mind is made up: The mantra of the faux noise viewer.
Omitting certain news also forms opinions. Like anything negative about this regime!
When FOX turns on Trump, then it will happen. Not before.
Murdoch would, as Rupert thinks he is a disgusting boor of a person, but they tried to tell the truth about Biden winning in 2020, and the viewers mostly deserted them. The bottom line is those viewers want the lies and propaganda, so Fox serves it to them.
I agree that Fox is partly to blame. I was just reading the comments from another substack I subscribe to and was dismayed to read a strongly worded comment about what a terrible president Biden was, mainly because he didn’t bow out sooner. This comment posted after a well written essay about the corruption in trump’s administration, the disastrous Iran situation, etc. There ensued a back and forth from many people lumping all Dems as “corrupt”, too old, needing an entirely new generation, blah, blah. Are these politically illiterate comments from purity seekers? Adherents to ageism? Russian bots trying to sow divisions? The almost 30% who still support trump? Yes Biden should have left earlier but his policies were sound and could have moved us in the right direction had we not taken a U-Turn in the election. And Professor Krugman’s points about Biden’s good economic policies being vilified are along the same lines. The purity, all or nothing, myopic attitude of too many people fills me with dread.
It is nearing election time, so the bots will start slagging the dems, in order to replicate the success they had with the 2024 election. They want to push the narrative "both-sides are the same" "your vote doesn't matter" etc. Anyone pushing that is an enemy of democracy, we saw what happens when voters stay home. Call out the liars, so others don't get swayed by them.
I don't believe if we didn't have Fox News and the right wing media everything will be peachy. They are giving their audience what it wants - "facts" and cherry picking that confirms their view of the world. It's a reinforcing cycle. More propaganda that makes these people feel good about themselves, more audience, more revenue. Remember when Fox wasn't Trumpy enough and these people flocked to Newsmax? They were getting a bigger hit with Newsmax.
It think it's naive to believe that if we can only get people to see facts and reason they will flock to our side. I'm also not immune. I get news from a lot of sources and I like to think I'm well-informed but I tune in to MS NBC to get comfort from people who have the same views. I read PK for a lot of the same reasons. I like to think I'm getting a point of view based on events and reality, but then again.
There will always be political and ideological bias in news. Which is apparently what the Founders intended? And Opinion is also perfectly OK. But when Opinion not borne out by facts--or in contradiction to it--is passed off as *news,* that's a problem.
The Founders made it pretty clear that the 4th Estate had a special and essential role in ensuring the survival of our form of government. But facts-free "news"--mainly but not exclusively from the Right--will only lead us to dictatorship and poverty.
I come from Europe. In "my" country the news was read every evening at 8 p.m. in about 20 minutes. Factual. Addionally every broadcaster had a program with back-ground stories. I was shocked when I moved to the US and saw the one hour "news shows" with two anchor who often thought they needed to be funny. Now "news"channels stream mainly shows with anchors who push an opinion. Usually right-wing because then facts do not matter as much. Facts are annoying because usually they are complicated.
I've read that FOX is on TVs in many public places--waiting rooms at dentist and medical offices, garages, airports, gyms, train stations, bars, restaurants, etc. Perhaps if you are a paying customer at one of these places you could request they switch the station or turn it off altogether.
Or make it clear that they've driven you away as a paying customer because of it...
I always do, I ask them to change the channel to something pleasant, like the Home/ garden channel where they make homes for people.
You're kind. And polite.
I simply walk out, and never return.
Interestingly it has been very well received. I was in the dentist office (I live in FL in a very red area) with two other ladies, and I politely requested something more pleasant, the receptionist apologized, and complied, and the two ladies looked up from their phones and thanked me! They actually said they never thought to ask.
Exactly right, this thesis by Krugman only reinforces the fact that mainstream media (Fox News is still the number 1 news channel) controls the narrative and the minds of the voters to get them to vote against their own interests. Many of us have family that watch Fox News and witness this first hand. All these arguments Krugman laid out are not new and many of us made during the election. But to no avail, when the mindless masses are whipped into a frenzy over illegal immigrants and college loan subsidies, while the rich take us all for a ride.
There are certain hot button issues they know get people whipped up. And they keep pushing those buttons.
No, actually, since, per McLuhan, the medium IS the message, the only way to compete is for Progressive billionaires to bite the bullet and take on the ongoing costs of maintaining a balanced national media environment.
The mainstream “liberal” media played a huge role in the distorted picture people were getting of Biden’s economy. They ignored or downplayed most of the evidence of the good economy but constantly hyped inflation stories, particularly about the price of gas and eggs, neither of which Biden could have done anything about. Gas prices had gone down during Covid because people were staying home but went up after Russia caused sanctions to be imposed by invading Ukraine, not because Biden was spending too much. And it’s not like Biden was going to farms infecting chickens with bird flu.
On the day in June 2024 that the World Bank announced that it was increasing its prediction of world economic growth, citing the strength of the US economy driving that unexpected growth, I was sure this would be a huge boost to Biden. Instead most of the media buried that story in back pages or just ignored it. The NYT chose to have yet another article about the price of eggs prominently placed on its front page. The WaPo buried that story in a back section. After it became clear that inflation was gradually lowering without that deep recession Larry Summers had claimed was necessary, the media switched to their “vibes” narrative.
The media also kept slamming Biden and Harris for not touting their accomplishments. When they did try to talk about economic accomplishments they were slammed for not being sympathetic to the struggles of average/“real” Americans. Apparently the media doesn’t think average people need more affordable child care, health care, education, or rising wages. Under Biden we had the lowest unemployment in over 50 years with record lows for African American men but that apparently isn’t something that benefits average folks, either. Unemployment for African Americans has gone up under Trump but that isn’t a big story.
As Dean Baker has dominated the media didn’t just distort their coverage of the economy, the also outright lied about it at times. For example the NYT claimed recent grads couldn’t find jobs when the truth was unemployment for recent years was at a 20 year low.
“Yes, the Media Lied About the Pre-Election Economy”
https://deanbaker22.substack.com/p/yes-the-media-lied-about-the-pre?utm_source=publication-search
For decades, mainstream media, whether right-leaning or not, has exaggerated the role that presidents play in the direction of the economy, especially in the short-term. Incumbents brag if the economy is good; challengers attack if the economy is bad. Campaign coverage reports these claims uncritically and amplifies them (including by amplification of demonstrably false narratives) because they play into the "horse-race" angle, and that kind of reporting attracts viewers/readers (as opposed to, say, reporting on the baleful long-term consequences of Reagan-era tax policies, which bores people). The fact that many voters accept the premise that the president can be credited or blamed for the economy six months into his term (much less on "day one") is a consequence of decades of idiotic media coverage. In the short-term, the economy does what it was going to do, unless the president takes affirmative steps to screw it up (oh, wait).
Some of this is the Bully Pulpit effect. Presidents attract far more listenership than they merit. Trump has certainly turned this up to 11. I for one am considering cancelling my Atlantic subscription because even that magazine has perhaps 2/3 of its articles about Trump in some way and I frankly would like to hear far less about the man. As a matter of preserving the mental peace, I’d like to keep his mindshare down to no more than 10 minutes a week.
In defense of the Atlantic, I'm keeping my Atlantic subscription forever or as long as they up the good work and they have the long form journalism that you can't get anywhere. And there was that article about Best Restaurant Bread.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I'd like for Trump to become irrelevant and there might be the occasional article about how he's coping in prison, but he's President. His actions have consequences and he does have the stage whether we like it or not. We have to suffer through this unfortunately.
I’m keeping my Atlantic subscription but I get your frustration.
Then came tariff wars...where's the money?
In Trump's pockets. Where else?
Biden was in an unusual situation because of Covid’s horrific effect on the economy just as Obama after the ‘08 meltdown. In both cases the US economy bounced back significantly better than other rich countries because both Obama and Biden spent while European countries doubled down on austerity. Government spending when an economy is depressed — Keynesian economics — still works.
this is a hugely important observation - along with the media's sanewashing of Trump's demented ramblings so they appeared to make some sense.
We need to start calling the mainstream media “right wing media.”
Fox is the mainstream media. What used to be mainstream is now the "legacy media."
Corporate owned oligarch media.
The claim that Harris didn't "present a clear and coherent message" is still being repeated like a broken record with a slight change, "Democrats continue to fail to present a clear and coherent message". And if I never hear "Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" it will be too soon.
Democrats have a clear and coherent progressive message they could deliver, if they wanted to. It would resonate with all of the low income, Hispanic and Black young voters that Trump picked up.
This is one of those cases where like Reagan said, in a choice between a true progressive and a fake one, the true one will win every time.
The problem for Democrats is they are addicted to campaign money. The donorsphere, the set of people with enough money to throw away on politics, is fundamentally uninterested in paying their employees more. So they feel they can’t go to an economically left campaign. This leaves social leftism (which the donors don’t care about) for them for virtue signalling. Unfortunately there is a large segment of the population actively enraged by that stuff and it isn’t doing them any favors.
If Mamdani is any indication I think they might try some old fashioned economically progressive policies. Milquetoast with a liberal coating of gender reassignment for children is just not working for them.
Campaign money does matter. Musk spent tens of millions in PA alone. Controlling the narrative matters. Progressives need to understand that. I am progressive, but the idea of "my way, or the highway" is unfortunately a pitch that dividing a party can somehow win an election. WE are facing a crisis in America. Solidarity will make or break this country. Winning is everything! Losing,,, cancels all the ideals of progressive politics. I wish it were not so, but realistically one goal supersedes all others. A more progressive message is a winner, but to make rules based on how "progressive" people are is a divider.
BOTH parties are addicted to campaign money. Congressmen spend literally *half* of each two-year term fundraising. There's like a 94% correlation with victory in a House race to which candidate raised the most money.
To paint this as a Dem issue is extremely myopic.
Having said that, Republicans are simply excellent at messaging, with fresh talking points distributed to their politicians and Influencers daily. And RW media nearly 100% supports this. The Dems have nothing like this.
Orban proved that buying up and consolidating media was an essential tool to hiding corruption and maintaining power perpetually.
Citizens United forced the parties to go after the big donors. It was the John Roberts Court that set this up, not the parties themselves.
I disagree about Republicans haing "fresh talking points". They campaign on the same issues over and over: Deficit, racism and abortion. I see your point, though.
GOP politicians get a fresh talking points memo daily from the RNC. Which has been going on for 15? 20? years now. Maybe longer.
Which is why GOP pols and influencers are always so coordinated in their messaging. At least compared to Dems.
👆🎯Yes we could have a good economy, and the best plans, but the corporate-owned media won't cover it.
Lamestream media needs a way to distract our attention from the fact that the election was rigged/stolen. Kamala won.
Trump really did win the popular vote. You might argue Clinton won. Harris? No.
No, you can't argue Clinton "might" have won the popular vote. She won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. Did Trump cheat? NOOOO, Trump would NEVER cheat /s.
Call the bots out on it, we can't let them win again.
We should also mention Biden's child tax credit, which wiped out much of childhood poverty in the country. Because the media would not report on it, it expired. I recall a CNN report on a family with twelve children complaining about the price of milk. It never mentioned that this family must have been in much better condition because of the tax credit.
Biden was a good Potus. I liked him a lot and felt that the criticisms he got were based more on the fact that he was so very white looking, more so than his 'bad' policies. Biden did a lot of good things!
I agree. He pulled us out of the COVID pandemic which was no small feat. Trump just got more people killed.
I was about to write my own comment to Krugman’s very welcome piece, but you said it all. FOX commentators mislead. I expect that. But the injustices perpetrated by mainstream media drive me nuts. It’s as if everyone is on the take.
Thanks for your comprehensive comment.
And there was always the 'imminent recession' when President Biden was in office. Not a peep about that, now, even though it's a lot more likely.
I canceled all my mainstream media subscriptions over their biased reporting, starting with "but her emails" when Hillary Clinton was running for president. Not a word, though, about the draft-dodging, tax-evading, failed businessman, rapist, and pedophile.
Bloomberg's "panel of experts" proclaimed a 100% chance of recession by October 2023.
The now famous Ipsos poll of Trump voters in Nov. '24 found that 85% of them get some/most/all of their news from FOX News. And that 80% believed FOX lies, including the one that the "Biden economy" was *already* in recession.
👆🎯
You are correct that the media lied about the economy. The question is why? My opinion is the NYT and mainstream media did not want an economy nor a president that benefits the 90%. They are comfortable with the economy that redistributes to the top ten percent. Voters need to become educated about the economic policies that benefit all Americans. The Democratic Party also did a poor job of getting the message to voters.
The GOP is simply superb at messaging. And with an entire media ecosystem at their disposal to lie about...literally everything, they're very good at seizing power. Which is also why conservative politicians lie so brazenly--like Trump in a national debate claiming Haitians were eating the Dogs and Cats.
But like in Orban's Hungary, Conservatives are lousy at actually governing. Corruption, incompetence, expensive wars, deficit spending, and impoverishment--of the bottom 95%--are what results.
👆🎯And yet their voters forget, and elect to get fleeced again and again.
You are correct the NYT is the paper of the ultrawealthy and they want to keep the status quo. Here is a quote from their editor Joe kahn: top NY Times editor: ‘covering the next Trump presidency is going to be awesome’ Fasten your seat belts. If Trump wins again, the New York Times will be committed to covering every aspect of that story as it unfolds. It would be, as our reporting shows, a disruptive Presidency if he wins. We will have a full-time job covering the implications of that. And we’ll need a team of people who are geared up, as in the first term, but even more so, for a very disruptive presence in the White House. And what we’ll do is we’ll show up and we’ll do our jobs."
Does that sound normal to you?
Agreed! I had massive arguments with my 'liberal' Democratic friends, and I'm a life-long Democrat! I also taught Graduate level architecture for over 35 years. I know the effect it has on HIRING decisions when you get a kid who comes in for an interview, and the first thing they want to tell you is: Their pronouns. The kiss of death. Un-employable. A fact that all my liberal friends scream at me for stating the truth. Pronouns were part of the un-doing of the Democratic Party and their ability to win elections!
Decline happened to the Sierra Club when they moved more into social issues and the pronoun bit. Damn, countering eco-dunce Donald and his rapacious industrial cohorts is a helluva lot more important than pronouns.
We weren't the ones obsessed with pronouns, the republicans were, and harped on it.
Yes, even the MSM does their bit.
First: Corporate news organizations, regardless of orientation, are in the business of selling what they write. If people won't read it, news organizations are likely to change what they write. The alternative is public funded news, and its hardly a coincidence that our president is trying to stamp out the CPB, PBS and NPR. To be an informed reader requires reading from multiple sources, which far too many Americans simply don't do.
Secondly, unemployment statistics that include the Covid era make clear that college graduates did in fact experience greater difficulty finding a job and experienced higher rates of unemployment during the period roughly 2020-2022. But so did every other employment group. Were the comments by college graduates looking for a job justified? Relative to certain other groups of unemployed? No, but relative to other college graduates? I think I'll give the NYT a pass on this one..
As for rising wages v. rising costs, while the argument that wages have risen in concert with rising costs is largely accurate, it frequently lacks context. For low wage workers, the key components of rising costs, e.g., food, gas, housing, etc., are critical as the wage increases they receive are not based on the components of cost that affect them most. Likewise, a certain level of wage increase will affect low and high wage earners differently. High wage earners not only receive more dollars for any given level of wage increase, but their higher wage levels also give them a greater ability to absorb the increases in key cost components than is the case for low wage workers. As a result, the effect of any given level of wage increase may be perceived differently by wage group.
For what its worth, I read Dean Baker's article and generally agree with what he had to say. However, his comments seem to suffer from some of the same criticism that he accords the NYT and others.
Well written, and so very accurate, the NYT had half a floor dedicated to finding negative stories about Biden. Those are not the actions of a dedicated journalistic organization. They sold us out, because they lost so many subscriptions because under Biden we had competent leadership and quit doom-scrolling, so they tried to manufacture crises. Also Biden wouldn't give them the interview they felt entitled to (nor would I if they gossiped about my son like a fish-wife which should be beneath them, but obviously wasn't.) also the editor Joe Kahn said "defending democracy was not his job."
https://substack.com/@jefftiedrich/p-146399983
I never underestimate the fox " news " propaganda machine.
Agreed. Our MSM has sustained a total moral collapse, just like the rest of the country. But remember YAHOO (You Always Have Other Options)? When I post this cartoon, it may not result in systemic changes. But it’s satisfying to know that like-minded people relate to it. It’s even more satisfying to know that, somewhere far far away, ketchup is being flung. That Mel Brooks-inspired approach is enough. For now. https://theweek.com/cartoons/674301/political-cartoon-obama-trump-big-shoes-fill
Do we really have MSM anymore or do we have OOM (oligarch owned media)?
Nailed it! Did you coin that acronym? Very witty.
MSM?
Mainstream media
Or this one… https://theweek.com/cartoons/945565/political-cartoon-trump-biden-debate
That's what I was thinking as I read the column. Fox was created by the greedy rich moocher class with intent to use its propaganda to aid in turning the United States into a plutocracy/kleptocracy that benefits wealthy white men at the expense of everyone else. I wish there was some way to stop the outrage-inciting falsehoods of Fox and its ilk without violating the First Amendment.
It wasn’t just Fox as economist Dean Baker documented here.
https://deanbaker22.substack.com/p/yes-the-media-lied-about-the-pre?utm_source=publication-search
Steve Bannon has bragged that he works hard to get his propaganda into the mainstream media because they do the most damage to Democrats. He is right.
Independent Media is doing that. But I fear the people who plug into the Independents are not the problem to begin with. So many Americans just don't want to pay attention to anything beyond Monday night football. The people who comment here care! They are concerned, 1/3 of this country is focused on marketing induced consumption, not the fate of democracy.
Pass an amendment to the Constitution that forbids lying by politicians and media.
It wouldn’t work. In some cases they don’t know the truth. In fact if you were able to look at our public discourse through the lens of the year 3000, most of what is said would be obvious fantasy and nonsense.
The way to shut it down would be to buy the business and then exercise some editorial control. You don’t even need to shut it down. It could still be a conservative news outlet, just a truthful and fair one.
Part of the problem with conservative media is there is not actually a free to watch sensible channel. There is rabid and there is raving looney. The WSJ which is known for its occasional (though hardly consistent) flashes of reality is unfortunately too expensive for more people and it isn’t on TV.
I propose convening a brain-trust of top Dem legal minds. And letting them come up with some sort of "Truth in News" legislation. That can pass 1st Amendment muster.
It could be as simple as loosening libel law to be more like the UK. Or at the very least requiring visual media to be like newspapers, and have separate sections for News and Opinion.
If we can't get it done, our future is Orbanization.
And who decides what's true?
They don’t so much lie as cherry pick stories.
They call themselves "fox'. What did you expect? We are the hen-house.
I'm unable to watch Fox. Oh, it's available on my streaming service, but I value my sanity. If I watched Fox, I'd probably end up shooting my TV (of course, I'd need a gun) like Elvis did repeatedly, what with his large disposable income.
It does help us to understand why you would want to shoot the tv. Apparently in Elvis' case, he was high, and hated Robert Goulet.
"Which makes me wonder how much of Trump2's ongoing hostility to Electro is him following the the dictates of our Petro Barons."
That's a pretty easy question to answer...almost all of it. The oil sheiks give him what he wants - lots of money - and they get what they want - anti-renewable energy policies and military and political protection for their oil profits.
Qatar is getting its money's worth from that winged $400 million bribe it gave Trump.
The part that's not driven by Trump's greed is driven by how Trump lives in the past. All his impressions about energy are mired in the '70s. So he thinks that renewable sources of energy don't work any better than they did 50 years ago and that that will always be so.
Cheny and Dubya--like a lot of GOP pol's--were oil men. And Cheney had a famous Oil-CEO-only retreat in their run up to the Iraq War. That we *still* don't know about.
There has been next to no leaking by these guys. Lots of speculation. But no hard proof on what Cheney was offering. Same is true right now with the US and Gulf Oil Barons.
These guys know how to keep their lips shut.
It was said in Kitty Kelly's bio about the Bush family, they were very shady, and you did not buck them.
I fail to understand how Fox News stays on tv? One day last week there was a photo of a man in his late 20’s holding a sign that something to the effect of: I don’t care what you say, I’m staying with Trump. As a grandmother I’m certainly old enough to understand that there are people who will believe anything but when the truth is handed to you on a silver platter and you rebuff it what more can anyone do?I also find it exhausting to (at the very least on a weekly basis) constantly being forced to remind people of the same issues over and over again as half the country does not possess the ability to remember the simplest of things like common sense?
The late Kevin Drum put it best: "Fox News is a cancer. It should be burned to the ground and the earth salted behind it. "
And there’s a bunch of other Fox imitators.
And the ashes micturated upon. For all the damage they have done in tearing families, and our country apart, with their lies and deliberate propaganda.
What a humane outlook.
In '24 Democrats were in turmoil with Biden forced out and Harris anointed in the proverbial smoke-filled back room. Trump was widely viewed as better for the economy and everyone hated "Bidenomics."
Trump was also seen as a peacemaker (Ha, Ha!). It was a perfect storm and Harris lost every swing state. Looks like they might do better in the midterms if we still have free and fair elections then.
Someone noted that the margin of victory in each of those swing states was just good enough not to trigger automatic recounts.
It sounds like the election strategists did their job well then. This alone does not voter fraud make. You may be sure they are dialing in their ad dollars to tilt key markets just enough to get the tiny margin of victory to get all the marbles for the state.
Many decades ago, states decided to manipulate the election process by making all of their votes go to the +1% victor in the race. Now the strategy allows the states to be manipulated to great gain.
If the president was decided by the national popular vote we would not have this gamesmanship. Every vote would count.
Big money makes a difference. Musk spent what? $23 million in PA alone.
Nearly $300 million total. Plus dedicating Twitter to the service of the Orange One...
Whatever the justification our founding fathers may have had for an Electoral College to prevent an unwanted presidency, it was proved wrong most clearly in 2024.
If there is a campaign for national popular vote elections for president, I haven’t heard about it. What better time than now?
There is in fact a gimmick.
Many, not enough, states have already passed a measure which commits them to casting all of their ballots in favor of the winner of the popular vote. If states representing 50%+1 of the electoral college pass this measure we will instantly and constitutionally in effect switch over to popular vote.
Though there will still be the nonsense about ratification of the results in Congress.
Eek! I had completely forgotten about the National Popular Vote Compact! But nonsense about ratification is predictable.
It was adopted to get the southern, slave-owning states on board.
Well, Trump did pull us out of Afghanistan.
He pulled out 90% of our combat forces. With almost no casualties, due to a secret deal he struck with the Taliban, that denied the Afghan Army US air support and logistics in return for them not attacking US forces.
Without air support and supplies, the Taliban slaughtered the Afghan Army, killing over 60,000 in about a year of fighting.
Trump left the 10% of US troops who remained as a poison pill for Biden. Who FOX News then pilloried in hundreds of segments as a traitor, idiot and coward.
And all the propagandists and sheep piled on willingly.
While we can’t blame all of the problems on Fox News, it would be nice to experience a world without them, at least for a decade or two.
It wasn't just Fox. ALL major media outlets were constantly attacking President Biden and pushing rightwing complaints about the economy, and most of their opinionators were visibly disappointed that they weren't able to will a recession into being before the election.
They also pounced on every stutter or gaffe made by Biden, and the fact that that was part of a corporate plan to destroy Biden and get Trump back in office is now beyond debate as we watch all corporate media studiously ignore Trump's worsening dementia and growing instability.
And let us not forget their counterpart in print the NYT with their half of an entire floor dedicated to slagging Joe Biden. Lucien Truscott explained it.
"Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again? The Times was down on Clinton for months because of her so-called email scandal that wasn’t a scandal at all, and when Russian intelligence leaked Democratic Party emails through WikiLeaks in the fall of 2016, reading the Times you would think that each and every DNC email that nobody bothered reading was a smoking gun. None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president.
There are no scandals with the name Biden attached to them, unless you consider the lies Russian spies supplied the so-called impeachment committee with. So The New York Times has apparently devoted half a floor in its Eighth Avenue headquarters to a search for bad news about Biden, and then they reserve a space nearly every day above the fold on the front page for whatever grain of grim garbage the Biden hunters have managed to come up with. They’re probably working on a story on how Biden is losing the pro-choice vote as we speak, while pointing out the wild success of Trump’s “move to the middle” on abortion with “centrist” voters.
If you’re getting off the subway anywhere near Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, hold your nose. There’s something fishy at the New York Times."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/something-wrong-york-times-140102338.html
Balderdash. The big three TV networks, plus CNN and MSNBC, have TEN TIMES the viewership of Fox News. And we all know what their preference and patter was. You're going to have to try a little harder to explain why people didn't like 9% inflation.
What were the profit margins of the oil companies doing? We still hear fantasies about supply chain problems. A pandemic was a cause for this inflation, but not the only cause.
Well, I can't think of a time when oil and gas prices went up that oil company profits didn't go up accordingly. It's a mystery!
Broadcast evening newscasts average 5-8 million viewers nightly. But that is a one-off for that day, because then the other programming for that evening starts. Fox "news" hits 2-3 million in prime time. But Fox and similar channels go on the whole day, hour after hour, tambouring their way of seeing things.
Wrong. Your math is about fifteen years out of date. FOX News accounts now for 60% of prime time news viewership: https://press.foxnews.com/2026/04/fox-news-channel-topples-cbs-in-viewers-and-dominates-all-of-cable-for-20th-consecutive-quarter
That's only in cable, which is only 20% of viewers and dropping.
Fox "news" gets 60% of people watching cable newscasters, with 2-3 Million viewers in prime time. But broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC) still beat that thanks to local affiliates, together totaling over 8 Million.
ABC alone gets over 8 million. Add up ABC, CBS and NBC, throw in CNN and MSNBC -- all of which are reliably anti-Trump and pro-whomever is opposing him -- and it's something like five times the viewers. The previous commenter's point is well taken about the rest of the programming, but Fox News's is still a relatively small audience in the context of the voting public. And CNN and MSNBC are doing the same thing on behalf of "the resistance." And we haven't even mentioned the ladies of The View, who pull in an average of close to 3 million viewers every day for their political diatribes. Or Colbert and Kimmel. And on and on.
Yes. But Fox"news" and similar channels go on all day long, hour after hour. Especially in the evening they are full blast angry. Anchors cannot be bothered with info-gathering, there is only opinion-blathering. Many people use their TV as something akin to digital wall-paper, paying not a lot of attention, but still picking up a sound-bite here and there.
The View, Colbert, Kimmel, etc. are acquired tastes. They preach to the choir.
ABC’s evening newscast is currently the most‑watched of the big three wih 8.4-8.7 Million viewers, CBS evening news has typically around 4.2–4.3 Million viewers, and NBC nightly news gets jut above 6.9 million viewers. (So the numbers I found earlier were too low - thanks for mentioning that!)
Yeah, how the Tiffany Network has fallen from the days of Cronkite or even Rather. As far as "full-blast angry "is concerned I don't think Fox has a monopoly on that; the ladies of The View, Larry O'Donnell, Joy Reid etc get pretty worked up on the reg. And I still can't believe Stephen Colbert didn't get taken off the air after calling the President of the United States Putin's "c**k holster." The point is that there are an awful lot of voices that are countering the Fox News narrative; it's hardly a monolith even if it does get better ratings. Maybe the other networks should think about expanding their audience rather than "preaching to the choir."
Democrats don't get credit, Republicans don't get blame.
Unions + worker-focused government policy = an environment where Americans and EU citizens have thrived. Those halcyon days of working folks affording homes, cars, etc are not gone. They have been yanked away by government policy that favors upward distribution of wealth and devastation to collective bargaining. Much of this negative momentum was/is driven by the R party and its amplifiers. Pretty simple. What’s complex is not the societal and governmental solutions; rather, it’s the political. Many in the U.S. are ignorant as to how government works and have been indoctrinated to believe “gummint” is wasteful and stupid, and unions ruined America. Quite the opposite has been true.
I'm right with you bro 100 percent.
I'm 71 and its always been that way.
Respectfully, I am a bit older and remember when an ambitious blue collar worker could build a new home, with his stay-at-home mom spending her time raising a family, have a nice vacation at the lake, and still save for retirement: single worker for profit. That is gone.
My father had an 8th grade education and worked in a textile mill and with overtime supported himself, me , my mom and grandma. He bought and paid off a house in 11 years, we always had a 3 to 6 year old car and with my mom and grandma cooking mostly from scratch were surely never hungry.
He sounds like a great man.
He struggled a lot because of PTSD from WW2 , they really had no clue on how to treat it back then.
A neighbor of mine was a tank driver in the Battle of the Bulge and one could tell it still had a grip on him 70 years later.
I believe that the number of billionaires in the US at that time was not 900.
I doubt that there was even one. Multi millionaires would have been the peak.
There was one: Howard Hughes.
I didn't know that I think he died in about 1971 . Considering what a dollar was worth in those days he must have been at muskrat level wealth. 🤯
With all due respect, I’m a bit older and never knew anyone like that. My mother, my grandmothers — all worked. No vacations at the lake. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I’m saying the good old days weren’t all that good for everyone.
And, the good old days as they describe were primarily for white people.
You beat me to it...
That was certainly the case in East Tennessee.
When I speak to people in the Trump voter demographic these days, they seem not to realise that they've spent decades now voting to shift laws and policies towards being "business friendly" and reducing worker rights and protections. They are often focused on blaming younger workers, immigrants etc. and don't seem to understand that the "worker friendly" policies they've voted to remove were significant contributors to those golden days of the past you mention.
That was in the 35 years following the Second World War - the glorious years. That all changed in 1980 when Reagan got elected.
I'm over 65, and I remember well working for a company for many years, getting my yearly evaluation, yearly raises and promoted from within, with company health benefits, a 401k and retirement benefits. It used to pay to stay. Then companies realized they could get full-time performance out of an employee but save all the benefits costs by working them 32 hours a week - just under the true "Full time employee" mark. Then it collapsed from there.
But as I mentioned below, the American Dream days of Dad at work, Mom at home raising the family and going on vacations was largely for whites. African Americans were making great social and economic strides back then, but were still marginalized, and rather obviously, too.
The onslaught of the once thriving American
Dream proceeds unabated.
Redeeming it will be fraught with daunting challenges.
Hungarians just voted out Viktor Orban because they had had enough.
Enough of corrupt officials siphoning off EU money meant to benefit ordinary people,
Of Orban’s subservience to Putin,
Of Orban’s pardon of a pedophile in charge of an orphanage,
Of 20% inflation.
Of constant official lies.
Voter turnout was nearly 80%. If only we can have such a turnout here!
I'm older and remember that time too Susan.
Except for the fact that my parents both were college graduates, you are accurately describing my family in the 1950s.
If we could get the average person to understand this, every year would be a blue wave. Seriously Democrats are perceived as everything the Republicans actually are. So if you are out there bashing Dems, you are part of the problem.
On purpose I suspect, it is bot season from now until November. Call out the lies. Lets not let them win, like they did in 2024.
One thing I’m amazed about Mamdami is he’s figured out how to get around this.
You notice corporate media never covers his actions.
It’s pretty hard to square this statement: “it isn’t consistent with complaints about huge, widespread declines in overall purchasing power” with an annual COLA wage increase at 2.5-3% (I’m a state employee — no bonuses or stock options for me!) with inflation that’s been at that rate or higher for years. I AM poorer every year. Gas prices are the highest they’ve been in my life (and they were pretty dang high in 2008!), housing costs have increased 50% since 2019, a loaf of bread is $9! Of course the economy is worse now. You’d be blind to think otherwise.
IOKIYAR. IACIYAD.
Is talking about wages alone good enough to address the K shape economy? High wage earners may have lower rise in wage levels during the Biden years, but what about their passive income and capital gains from investments? Lower wage workers typically have none or very little of these income sources. Would this also cause bigger income/wealth disparities and hence weakened general consumer sentiments?
I think there is a big difference between 'high wage earners' and the extremely wealthy who actually don't get their money from wages at all. I am guessing that that is the territory into which Prof Krugman is planning to take us, as he discusses why people's sense of the economy actually has surprisingly less to do with income or standard measures of purchasing power than we tend to assume. That's obviously a critical issue, so I'm really looking forward to reading what he has to say, especially since he is someone who is both immensely knowledgable and deeply kind and ethical.
I'd also like to see charts and discussion not just about INCOME but NET WORTH. Isn't the point of the K-shaped meme that the rich get richer while the poor get deeper in debt? With ever more of the nation's wealth in the hands of the top 1%/.01%/.0001% ...? Which has very large implications not just for public vibes but for actual politics and power.
Thank you for your comment. I was commenting on the content of this post. What Professor Krugman will write in the future about the subject is something that I can't speculate or comment on, his knowledge, kindness and ethics notwithstanding.
I completely agree here. Metrics of inflation dont count healthcare, college, and other volatile metrics. If we look at the earlier era or Biden era getting .5% or 1.5% ahead of inflation matters very little compared to the big ticket items not in the inflation. One just needs to look at the ever expanding debt of the bottom 50% and their trivial assets to see while this 'vibecession' persists.
Yes, so many large and volatile costs beyond just housing. Healthcare certainly affects everyone - expensive, confusing, and often is unpredictable for the individual as to what, when, and where. Cars have also gotten very expensive to obtain, maintain, and keep gassed up. Utilities fluctuate depending on type, and bills are going up as climate change keeps ac working harder or knocks out unusual locations like an ice storm in Texas.
I also think the way we do pricing in America skews how we perceive things. We never see the actual *cost*. At a restaurant, the food supposedly costs X amount, but we have to tip at the end of the meal because the server isn’t really earning a proper wage. At the store, items have prices, but the cost varies based on tax. I live in a metro that doesn’t just have various taxes between its cities and counties, but it also straddles a state line with very different taxes. Kansas recently phased out tax on groceries. Missouri is trying to phase out income tax and replace it with sales and use tax. So depending on where you are and what you are buying, who even knows what tax is added at checkout.
The problem is wages are largely set by boardrooms not the government. Elections don’t matter for this stuff, or rather they might but it is $1:1vote and happen at annual shareholders meetings by only those poised to directly profit by screwing you over. You are not even allowed in the boardroom.
A solution would be to give workers a vote in these elections. We could for example take all of the private equity and institutional funds shares that literally can not vote (e.g. your 401k) and turn those proxies over to employees.
As it is, since somewhere between half to 2/3 of all shares fall into this category, someone with a 10% holding in the company might hold 30% voting share in the company, delivering a sizable, undeserved and unpaid for subsidy for the wealthiest, so they can help make sure your paycheck gradually decreases relative to inflation year over year, until finally all the money is theirs!
This is how and why you are getting fleeced. You think politics and government is the answer — look at the birdie! — all while your pocket is picked in the board room before you even get your paycheck.
The problem isn't Biden versus Trump. It's the shoveling of money to the top that accelerated during Reagan and has persisted since. We have finally reached the point where people are feeling it and not at all happy. I suspect social media has had a lot to do with it. But yes, it is plain now that people increasingly realize they were duped. Trump left us worse off by his incompetence in managing COVID and he is doing it again with his incompetence across the entire spectrum of presidential responsibilities. America will be worse off when he leaves, and hopefully a Democrat will win and can set about trying to fix things (again) while Republicans do all they can to obstruct it. Meanwhile, despite being raised in a solidly middle class household, my kids are having a hard time getting their first step up the ladder. Good jobs seem scarce and hard to get. AI is threatening to pull the rungs out from under them. People are indeed unhappy with the prospects, and rightfully so. The oligarchs that run this country have no intention of sharing the bounty they've been collecting, and people and communities damaged by AI will not be helped, the same as happened with the last round of globalization.
Unfortunately, I think many people have a short memory. This is why we have the orange stain back in the oval (gilded?) office. Americans are too fickle and were willing to self sabotage against the Democrats for not bringing change fast enough.
Short memory has been a problem for decades. It seems that the only memories that last are hatreds.
Rid us of citizens united and the electoral college
Well- and succinctly put.
Trump also added new tax cuts in his first term. Now made permanent.
In the post-pandemic Biden years, the US had lower inflation than most of the world, and this point should be hammered home.
This was obvious at the time, and known to anyone who read or watched credible media .....
I think it was obvious for those who put in effort to make sense of the messy reality, but with the lack of mainstream media coverage to amplify the narrative then it was difficult for ordinary non-economists to set the record straight with other ordinary folks.
Maybe part of the blame goes to Biden too for not figuring out how to tell the story in a way the media would reinforce, instead of only repeating assertions about what the data showed. I don't want to be unfair to him though - the absolute lion's share of the blame goes to Fox News for misleading the public about the hard data in bad faith. But still I wish Biden had found some better way to counter that narrative.
For example, even just the other day I tried bringing up the point Paul Krugman is making that I felt the record is not fair enough to Biden, and how a lot of the inflation in his term was caused by COVID, and less by his particular intervention to give us savings cushions to deal with COVID. I got push back. Despite a cordial debate, I lost or reached something of an impasse. I had no idea how to back up what I was saying with enough hard data - compared to the guy I was debating who could simply repeat Fox News talking points, which constitute the prevailing wisdom and narrative. I wish I had been able to point to Paul Krugman's article in response.
Maybe one thing the Democratic party lacks in setting the record straight is enough infrastructural support to recruit non-experts in to the task of amplifying their record. Maybe it feels distasteful, as it would be hard to distinguish that type of messaging approach from one of pure propaganda, but I believe there is a way to do it that is still beholden to truth.
My observation is that a great proportion of the people in the country do not pay close attention to political news, but they buy groceries and gas. They have an idea of what they should pay, perhaps from some key earlier point in their lives. When those prices rise significantly, they feel it and are upset. Of course, the gullible do believe what Fox News propagandizes, and that fact is important for older, less sophisticated voters. The educated, learned do pay attention and do know how on the right track was Biden. Put simply, to elect the next Democratic leaders who must void everything Trump and Republican have done to destroy our country, and to try to start the reforms for "never again," the biggest campaigning point must be prices and inflation.
Americans always go for the flashy, new kid on the block and ignore the plodding, quiet type. It happens in movies, music, writing, sports, merchandising, and politics. Joe was a fine president and will go down in history as such. Donald, no so much.
More like not at all!
I, for one, hope that Americans never forget Donald Trump and what he has done and when they think of him they say, "never again".
I expected USAmericans to say that after the first time. But no, they came back for more.
Yep, that's human nature, Paul. We truly don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone :((
As always, thank you for your Substack piece this morning. I learned a lot from it. It prompted me to reflect, think, and remember. :)
I think Hisotry will reflect that Biden in fact was a very good president. He was handed a train wreck from Trump with a COVID Pandenmic that near killed Trump due to his ignorance in not listening to the smartest doctors in the World. I attribute Trump living through COVID as to God and Satan neither one want that P0S. I have an entire family that to this day still has not had a COVID vaccine because Tucker told them not too. I watched people here in Alabama making more money than they have ever made whine about the economy when there were Help Wanted signs on every business. Now you can't buy a job and they have nothing to say. We have a good 30% of the Country that is devoid of facts and only see what they are told to see by the people that validate their racism because when you get to the bottom of it all, that is the only thing the Reich has to offer and for more than half of us, it is not something we want. Very few of these Trumputians are ever going to leave Trump and our best option is to recruit New Voters because we have near half the country doesn't vote and if you recruit them to Truth and Facts when they are young, they will be on the side of Truth and Facts their entire lives. Maybe then we can rid ourselves of this Murdock/Limbaugh Hate Crowd.
If average Americans hadn't been made vulnerable through 40 years of trickle down economics and Republicans deregulating everything and refusing to guarantee healthcare and pensions and basically anything that helps people maybe this could have been different. We shouldn't be celebrating 250 years as a country but mourning what we've become under Trump and 50 years of Republican lies and screwing everyone but the affluent in every possible way.
You get it.
I still have our copy of the Economist from November of 2024 with its headline: " The Envy of the World". - referring to the Biden economy!
Unfortunately the there are very few who read the Economist.
I don't subscribe to the Economist - but that cover was flashed all over the media a the time it came out...
Dismissed by MAGA as a “leftist rag.”
While it is nice to think in contrapositives, saying that Harris would win the election is a hollow victory. Anyone with half a brain should have known that Trump was going to be terrible, and he proves it almost daily.
as he was aided by the SC giving him immunity
This is a minor point and you kind of allude to this in your post, but are wages a reliable measure for people at the top? I’m under the impression that many of these people skip wages in favor of stock or other strategies that help them avoid taxes? Just curious.
I don't believe that these are just "misperceptions of The Biden Economy"! These "mispections" were the direct result of a well coordinated effort by the wealthy Right-wing corporate media that favors inequality in favor of their own interests!
👆🎯The NYT was the worst.
I think the mood of the working and middle-class is a result of "financial burnout" or "economic exhaustion." It happens when people have been struggling and using credit to compensate for a long time and see no end in sight. It's like driving an old car "forever" and paying for expensive repairs because it's impossible even to buy a better used car.
When it can no longer be repaired, and there is no way to get to work, things get much worse faster. The feeling of impending doom doesn't go away. I think maybe only people who have experienced this way of living, with no light at the end of the tunnel, can understand the tension felt every morning when a worker turns the key in the ignition to see if the car will start and take them to work (or door dashing). "Official statistics" can't explain away the reality for those at the bottom of the K-Shaped economy. They're not okay.
The longevity stats that we don't live as long as other comparable wealthy countries apply to those who live every day under that burden, not to the well-off. That kind of stress affects longevity.
I read about the Gilgo Beach killer. His victims were mainly women with a broken marriage or escaping another difficult situation, who could not make ends meet. They advertised themselves on Graigs-list, selling "the one thing of value they still had". It made me immensely sad - and angry. Women should be better protected financially and otherwise.
Not to be troll-ish, but I reiterate my point from last week: all this analysis overlooks the people like me.
I'm not low wage, I'm not an oligarch. I am a well-educated, middle class entrepreneur, a small business owner.
Whether I'm squeezed by a vibe or a hard stat, the fact remains that my customer base consists of only a tiny group of highly affluent customers oblivious to price changes while the vast bulk of my clients can no longer afford me in the same way they did before.
My income has risen slightly since Trump 45, but my costs have become insane, my lifestyle has diminished, and all the pretty charts in the world don't reflect that. I'm all in for the gig workers getting a big bump, but their experiences don't reflect the reality for the professional working class, which is also a big part of America.
I led with I'm middle class, I now feel like I am hanging onto that moniker by my rapidly breaking fingernails.