ALRIGHT ALREADY

The media's apology game offers a reward for a fraud

This is one of those media moments that make me wonder if the mainstream media is as stupid as Trumplandia claims. The endless parade of panels looping for hours the refusal of Trump to name the evil that is white supremacy is doing more to trivialize and toxify the issue than to clarify it.

It’s an undeniably valid case for getting that maniac out of the White House and It’s so obvious why that’s true. It’s also obvious that after panelizing every nano molecule of his malignancy for two years I get no sense that anybody on the screen knows anything about him. Is he a racist? What was he trying to say? Why say the right thing the next day and unsay it the following day? Who’s advising him?

He won’t name the name for the same reason he claimed during the campaign to not know who David Duke was and didn’t know anything about Putin who was so nice to him when he was in Moscow. While all the evidence to the contrary sits on youTube. They were suddenly strangers to him because they’d praised and supported him and he didn’t want to blow the support. The white nationals are a solid base of support that sing hymns to his majesty. He’s a racist when he is and he’s not one when he’s not. He lives his entire life in the current moment and every trace of a worldview is based solely on how his ego feels at this precise instant.

Each one of those statements about Duke and Putin is true and he never said the ones that he’s being criticized for. Only a fake news reporter – a person of disgusting character – would suggest otherwise.

That this isn’t obvious by now makes the endless yakking, to the exclusion of all other news coverage, a gift to Sean Hannity, validating his nightly braying about how all this Trump mayhem is just a made-up piling on by liberals over nothing.

The most maddening part of the CNN and MSNBC wall of noise is the media institution of demanding that this president or that senator utter specific words of apology for saying what they’d intended to say. And when those I’m-sorryesque words are finally read off the page, the panels will go on for another week analyzing the sincerity of the apology as if the sincerity part wasn’t clearly defined by the caravan of donkeys and elephants required to pry the words from those cold rigid lips.

Those forced apologies are a free pass out of accountability. Alright-I’m-sorry-OK-I-apologize is not accountability. It’s not even an apology; but the endless demand for it gives it that pass. And also brings in some nice ratings and ad revenue for CNN.

— Polar Levine, News Goo Dissection, August 16, 2017

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