Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
It was news on Fox because Fox is now GOP Base TV. They fed their tribe a pile of shit about a caravan of families being filled with terrorists.
It was news on MSNBC because editors there thought they could use it as a Trump shaming story. They could argue to their tribal viewers that he was both a liar (using the caravan as a political stunt to gin up votes) and that he is cruel (the caravan is filled with harmless refugees).
The story worked for neither outlet. They just preached diametrically opposed narratives about a made-up non-event to their tribal viewers.
The story had zero impact on the midterms because voters had already locked in their positions long before this craven BS story was crafted by Trump and picked up by the media.
The only possible winner here was Trump, who succeeded in getting more free airtime for no good reason. But since his goal with the story was to create GOP voter turnout for the midterms, and he needs more free airtime like a moose needs a hat rack, one can't really say he won anything for his propaganda efforts. The only comment that fits, on this story and with so many others like it, is Everybody Invested in it Lost.
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It was all over all of the mainstream outlets, like the NYT and WaPo, because once the conservative media are talking about something, it's news (in Hank's objective sense of course) (there's no phenomena like that on the left, because there is no left-wing equivalent of Fox News or Breitbart). The story had a huge impact on the elections, because the point was to turn out the base and to keep the media from talking about the number one issue to voters, which was healthcare, or trade wars, or other things that non-partisans care about.
Congressional elections are a zero-sum game. It is not possible for everyone to lose.
