Politico Readers

~ Clarissa

I remember just a couple of weeks ago somebody came here to offer Politico as a reliable news source.

Politico:

One has to lack even a shred of self-respect to access this propaganda outlet for news. These people urinate in their readers’ faces and, I’m sure, mock their readership mercilessly during drinks after work. As well they should.

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Published by Clarissa

35 thoughts on “Politico Readers”

    1. “title is clearly true, what’s the problem with this article?”

      Either you’re not a native speaker of English or you do not have conscious awareness of certain semantic processes….

      to put it into (over?) simplified terms….

      For native speakers ‘try’ includes the information ‘unsuccessful’ or, depending on context ‘inappropriate’ (among other things).

      The meta-message here of “tries to tether” is “inappropriately tries to connect” or “was wrong to try to connect”

      So Politico is saying no connection should be made between Kamala “Joy incarnate” Harris and Joe “useless hasbeen” Biden.

      Presumably, you can understand why ‘tries to’ in this context is heavily biased.

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      1. Is that why these propaganda outlets are so successful? Because people are incapable of understanding a simple sentence?

        I never know if they are pretending to be obtuse or are sincerely this intellectually limited.

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        1. I’m gonna go with “sincerely this intellectually limited”. My inlaws are smart people, but their mental processes have been stunted by their devotion to CNN, and I do not think they are capable of analyzing any trusted news source. Once it goes in the “trusted source” box with CNN, it slurps unchewed and undigested right through their information gullets, bypassing all critical analysis.

          My parents, by contrast, have not had a TV in 50 years, and they’d nail that one to the wall in under a second because their critical capacities haven’t been disabled.

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          1. So…you have a problem with this clearly true title that talk about the best textbook political strategy ever done by Vance.

            Jeez, the level of snowflakery is off the charts!

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            1. Have you considered that this discussion might be too complex for you when you don’t know how to conjugate simple verbs in the present tense?

              Just saying.

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              2. By the way, Politico generally sucks ass, but not so much this time. Nothing is complicated here, this only a case of Trumpist snowflakery. Here’s what happened:

                1. Politico tweeted a factually true article headline.
                2. This offended the feefees of the “My feelings don’t care about the facts” crowd.
                3. Trumpists snowflakes (led by Michael Malice) have successfully ratioed this tweet.
                4. Politico replaced the title by something stupider and more biased than the original one.

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              1. That’s what comes from going to Yale. No way the dude could have figured out to do something so intellectually daring without an Ivy degree. One’s got to have a stack of diplomas to make that kind of a leap of logic.

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              2. Yeah, there is totally nothing else going on in that headline. Nope. Nosiree Bob. Nothing to see here. Just the plain, unvarnished, truth. Definitely not worth applying any analytical capacity to.

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              3. It’s also strange that people would go to such lengths to defend Politico. How can this outlet matter to them this much? Why do they get so invested into the idea of its infallibility? This particular headline has been mocked so much that Politico took it down (or edited). It’s very clearly stupid. Even if one is deeply in love with this news source, why not simply admit the glaringly obvious fact that this is a bad headline?

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              5. Charisma is something he definitely doesn’t have. Trump has oodles of it but so what? The wall still wasn’t built, Fauci wasn’t fired, BLMsters weren’t stopped, etc.

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              6. Both Harris and Trump are trying to untether themselves from their first term in office. We need to hold both of them to account. This will be good for all of us, no matter who we vote for. This will definitely be more useful than all the partisan bickering.

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              9. Nothing brilliant here, just a classic textbook strategy by Vance, which is the best that he can do.

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    1. Until 3 minutes ago, Biden was the best president in generation, Bidenomics was mega successful, and the inflation was a myth. Now all of a sudden, Biden is corrupt, Bidenomics failed, and prices are out of control. And people nod sagely without observing the slightest contradiction.

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      1. Also, the whole idea that Vance “tries to tether.” Harris’s current job is vice president in the Biden administration. She’s tethered to Biden by that fact much more than by anything Vance or anybody can say. She’s the vice president. Right now, at this moment.

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  3. When I read the MSM or really any media, I know that most authors have biases. I try to disregard the tone and look at the facts.

    How do you consume news otherwise? If you pick a source and consider it the absolute truth, it only makes you even more vulnerable for manipulation by that source.

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    1. I understand bias. Everybody has bias, including me. That’s very normal. But there’s bias and there’s direct mockery of people like they’re brain-dead morons. This headline is for morons.

      “Kamala Harris is an excellent candidate with exciting policies” is bias. I don’t mind that. If a journalist supports Harris, that’s fine and normal. But “Vance tries to tether a vice president to her president” is insulting. It denies reality in the most blatant way, inviting the readers to participate in madness.

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      1. Well, yes, the headline imputes motivation. The framing they want you to use is right there.

        Unfortunately, journalism is a business. You decry all the spin, but the fact is that sober articles that state only facts, with corresponding headlines, don’t get as many clicks or comments.

        There are business-people sitting at their desks watching live dashboards of information on their screen, correlating various aspects of the article, headline, and teaser to various metrics like click-through rates, how much time the reader then spends, what other pages they visit, and whether they click the Subscribe button on the page.

        They tweak things in real-time based on feedback (how the NYT, for example, changes digital headlines 20 minutes after publishing).

        Changes of a few percent in the metrics translate into big money. And continuously optimizing your content this way results in a media outlet incentivizing exactly the things you complain about. The journalists don’t have full control of what they have to say.

        If the media catered to people who want only the facts, it would go out of business, because those are in the minority.

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