Never Mind the News Media: Politicians Test Direct-to-Voter Messaging

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

"The Iran town hall event would be the third Mr. Sanders has held this year; more than one million people viewed the first, on health care, and roughly 2.5 million watched the second, on inequality, according to Mr. Sanders’s team."

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, both running this year, have started podcasts, with humanizing names like “Canarycast” and “Plaidcast.” Representative Devin Nunes of California has his own local news site, The California Republican, which is paid for by his campaign committee. Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat making a long-shot bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is streaming his entire campaign live on Facebook. And many other politicians are now routinely Instagramming and Facebooking, tweeting and Snapchatting.

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“But,” he added, “I think Democrats have got to understand that some of the most important issues facing our country are not going to be really talked about on television in the way that they should be.”

(snip)

“The reason we do these town meetings is we think the American people are a little bit smarter than the corporate media thinks they are,” he told a crowd of more than 150 supporters, who had braved a raging thunderstorm to attend.

(snip)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/bernie-sanders-town-hall.html

This is almost a good article, but it lacks at least one major component, there is no self or institutional critical analysis.

The article addresses different politicians and the public's lack of trust issues in regards to the traditional media but sluffs it all off as "politicians wanting to avoid tough media questions" and "fake news" it asks no questions of itself or makes no serious analysis at how we came to this point.

Decades of focus on elevating the superficial or fault line politics over the substantive, critical issues affecting the American People has consequences.

I can't ever remember any coverage by the corporate media particularly T.V. critical of itself or even coming close to broaching the elephant in the room subject; that being their own commercial economic conflicts of interest when presenting the news to the American People on a daily basis wherein the emphasis is overwhelmingly in favor of the private interest over the public and they say politicians want to avoid tough questions!