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Bullsh*t Wins When It's the Only Sh*t Around. Or The Information Environment is All [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-03-03

The Washington Post has the story of a young woman who voted for Trump but was fired from her government job and now has no job and no health insurance to cover her IVF costs. The young woman in question believed Trump when he said that he would make IVF free. A lot of people have an attitude that veers somewhere between “she gets what she deserves” and “of course she knew what Trump was going to do! Everyone did!”

Everyone did not.

When you look at the headlines around Trump and Project 2025, none of the from mainstream media sources ever made it clear that Trump was likely not being honest about his plans for Project 2025. The articles may have dug deeper, but if you look at the headlines, they all pretty much just state Trump’s disavowals of the plan at face value. And we know that the majority of people mostly read just the headlines.

If you look at how Trump’s promise of free IVF was covered, you see something similar. Headlines generally just repeated Trump’s claim at face value with no effort to explain that such a promise would be difficult and ran counter to GOP and even Trump’s past health care plans. If you, like the majority of people, primarily only read the headlines, like the young woman in the story, you would think that Trump was not going to implement the government destroying Project 2025 and make IVF treatments free. Her skewed view of the world was not inappropriate given the news environment in which she operated.

I am not going to waste my breath talking about what news organizations can and should do better. They know. They have known for years, and they have refused to make the appropriate changes. I doubt in this age of media capitulation — an era where the owner of the Washington Post explicitly states that only right-wing editorials will be welcome on his page, where the LA Times owner wants to have an AI ‘bias meter’ provide both sides of news stories, where the NYT thinks that anti-trans attacks are no big deal —that is going to change. No, what we need to focus on his how to change the media environment.

Right now, people like James Carville think that the Dems will win by sitting back and letting Trump fail and suffer the consequences. Thirty years ago, the last time Carville was relevant, that might have been a decent, if immoral, plan. However, in today’s media environment, that is not going to work. No matter how bad things get, there is a network of propaganda outfits, from Fox News to lifestyle podcasters, ready to blame DEI, Biden, Harris, Obama, bears, space-aliens, Europeans, Ukrainians, bigfoot, birds, windmills killing birds, and/or the parasitic brain worms that colleges place into the brains of all new students in order to make them woke and hate God, America, Capitalism and orange-hued men who betray America’s allies. People will not hear about the worst items, and when they feel pain, there will be a ready-made answer to why its someone, anyone else’s, fault other than Trump’s.

Even the smaller, background assumptions work against the left. I doubt that IVF was the only reason the young woman voted for Trump. She likely felt comfortable with Trump and thus more willing to believe what he said. Now, some of that may be racism and/or misogyny. But it also might be that this country mistakenly worships businesspeople and isn’t Trump a successful businessperson? Isn’t his name on skyscrapers and casinos and airplanes? Wasn’t he on a show that proved he was a genius businessperson? Shouldn’t I feel comfortable having him lead the country?

The reality of his failures, crimes, and frauds never penetrated the national consciousness, in large part because the media was either actively supporting him or trying to be “fair” to both sides and thus not telling the plain truth or didn’t exist at all. Trump did best in news desserts, places where there is little to no local news, and Harris did best where she spent the most money trying to pierce the propaganda bubble. Without countering that, the Dems are not going to do as well as they should in the next elections, even before you get to voter suppression, etc.

The information environment is everything. Right now, the country is either awash in right wing propaganda or it suffers from no news at all. In that environment, a young woman can believe that a candidate is going to make her life better when in reality, he plans on destroying it. Fixing that, fixing the general ocean of misinformation most people swim in, has to be the first, last, and only job for the next two years at least. Unless leftist and Democratic organizations are building out a network to deliver the truth, propaganda is going to continue to win.

And no one will have IVF treatments. Or a functioning government.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/3/2307334/-Bullsh-t-Wins-When-It-s-the-Only-Sh-t-Around-Or-The-Information-Environment-is-All?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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