Mass media has utterly failed to convey the policy stakes in the election

[applegrove]

Mass media has utterly failed to convey the policy stakes in the election

by Matthew Yglesias at Vox

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/2/13483020/policy-stakes-2016

"SNIP..............


Imagine, in other words, that Trump does what he says he wants to do on taxes, the environment, immigration, and health care. It’s true that he is not a passionate policy wonk; nor does he seem like someone who is deeply invested, on a personal level, in the non-immigration aspects of his policy agenda. But the agenda is there, and on all these non-immigration issues his views are basically in line with the vision put forth by Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who will do the boring work of drafting the bills for Trump to sign.

The result would be a sweeping transformation of American life. Millions would be forcibly removed from their homes and communities as new resources and a new mission invigorate the pace of deportations. Taxes would drop sharply for the richest Americans while rising for many middle-class families. Millions of low-income Americans would lose their health insurance, while America’s banks would enjoy the repeal of regulations enacted in the wake of the financial crisis. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gas emissions would end, likely collapsing global efforts to restrain emissions, greatly increasing the pace of warming.

Millions of Americans would love some or all of these changes, and millions of others would hate them. But most of all, the vast majority of Americans would simply be confused. Someone who’d been following the election moderately closely — scanning headlines, watching cable news, and tuning in to debates — would simply have no idea that this sweeping shift in American public policy is in the offing if Trump wins. Nor would they have any real sense of what the more modest shift in public policy that would emerge from a Clinton win would look like. Beneath the din of email coverage and the mountains of clichés about populism, the mass-market media has simply failed to convey what’s actually at stake in the election.

All elections are about policy

The standard explanation for why the media has paid such scant attention to the policy issues at stake in the election is that the 2016 race “isn’t about policy.” There’s certainly a sense in which that’s true — Trump has not spent a lot of time sweating the details of his policy pronouncements, and his lengthy rally addresses don’t talk about them much. But there’s also a sense in which it’s too self-referential. On the rare occasions when debate moderators asked the candidates about policy issues, they debated them. Had they asked more, the debate would have been more about policy.


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[Mika]

1. Mission accomplished.

[DK504]

3. Tragically I flipped on MTP daily. The Toad actually gave Kelly Anne over 10 minutes

without the Toad even questioning one damn word she said. He has a chance to actually play big boy journalist, but he let all the BS about the "emails" go past without one contradiction for her lies and slander.

The MSM has failed this country on such a level that we may never get back.

[DemocraticSocialist8]

5. I've said before on other messageboards that the MSM is in on it

Look at how they're sitting on this Trump rape story...