Like I’d be a lot less certain if I didn’t keep finding fingers pressing hard on the scales for Trump. I also have read all the reporting about how the GOP cares a lot about how the polling looks and is trying to push it one particular direction.
So knowing that + the media’s strong strong financial preference for a tight race + knowing the pollsters need to get their polls financed and the customers for that mostly being media organizations with a strong preference for a tight race…
I’m sorry I’m just not a buyer of the narratives the media is peddling. I genuinely think half the reason these races are close is that these fucking ghouls won’t do their fucking job and just report what the candidates are saying / who they are. I think these polls are a huge part of the problem and I think what we’re seeing is an already dead nepo zombie industry.
Think about the kind of person who goes to Journalism school now. Who fucking does that? Rich kids who want prestige and don’t have to worry about ever making money and no one else because there’s no fucking money in it except for like the top 300 people if that. Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt married to an heiress and that dumbfuck in the bow tie is heir to a soup fortune so of those maybe 300 jobs at least two are already occupied by the most privileged people who have ever lived full stop. That might literally be 1% of the upper middle class+ jobs in journalism just with those two nepotists.
I gotta be honest there’s a reason Trump attacking the media worked so well. He was mostly right. It is biased and it is bullshit. How do I know? I occasionally read an article about something I have a significant amount of first hand expert experience in… and almost without fail what I’m reading is so far from reality it’s functionally creative writing. You have that experience enough times (and I’m up to so many times I’ve lost track of how many it is) and you start to get pretty credulous.
The entire media ecosystem from how we seed the talent pool, to how we compensate the journalists, to how we run news rooms (the entire hierarchical structure needs to be analyzed and optimized) honestly needs to be gutted and renovated.
So yeah they can take their polls with their hilarious crosstabs and smoke them for all I care. I will get my data from literally any other source. I read the Washington Post every day for the same reason I read Fox News. I want to keep an eye on what my enemies (mostly big corporations who want to fuck me as a vendor, fuck me as a consumer, and just generally fuck me any way they can because I produce a fuckload of economic value and am from the perspective of capitalism immensely fuckable) want me to be thinking so that they can catch me with my pants down and fuck me like it’s a Diddy White Party.
The Democrats I tolerate mostly because they’re nominally for not fucking me. I say nominally because I fully think that half of the Democratic leadership are slow walking the entire agenda so that I can get fucked when I try to make a move for the mirage they keep putting up to lure me down to a spot where I’m fuckable. And most of the other half were selected because they were lame losers who always lose. Every once in a great goddamn while we get lucky and there’s a core group of leaders that can maybe just maybe give us peasants a shot at some upward mobility and stave off the always incoming at pretty much every moment in human history societal collapse.
One of my core principles is that you should be very suspicious of any version of events where a for profit corporation is acting against it’s own bottom line. The media are a series of for profit corporations. I am comfortable building that into my world view and using it to adjust what their coverage means. They are biased. In favor of themselves just like everyone else. The way they want to fuck me (and all of you) is they want to get me to spend an inordinate amount of time on their platform, pay them subscriptions, and watch ads… and to make that happen they’re going to tell me a story that makes me want to do that. A not close race is not a good news story it’s a snoozer. Nobody wants to read thirty eight think pieces about why Americans don’t like fascism. That’s what would happen if the media had simply reported every single thing Trump did in exhaustive detail since he came down that escalator. When he entered the campaign journalists should have dropped a bunch of pretty good stories about what a complete bag of shit Trump is to the point where he was under investigation by our inept law enforcement for embarrassing the system with the stuff the press found when they gave him a sniff immediately. His campaign shouldn’t have been reported on because it wasn’t news.
In 2024 the media outlets are players on the court involving themselves directly in the story. They aren’t calling balls and strikes and they aren’t telling us what’s happening. They take footage of the news that happened that day and then they clip it into whatever form will get them the most eyeballs ala reality television. They never go into any depth because that makes fakery harder and they never have any nuance because above all what they need is a plotline that will hook an audience that can compete against reruns of Law and Order SVU. The Washington Post literally was trying to hire someone reputable to steelman Trump’s economic policy arguments for this cycle and couldn’t find anyone credible. Why were they looking for that guys? They aren’t stupid this both sides bullshit is 100% about keeping the race inside the range where they make the most money and the GOP has reacted to this the way a pro athlete that knows they will get every call acts. They are a major component of where we are right now.
So yeah. My eyes are telling me a really clear story. Things are getting better economically right now, they aren’t great but they’re getting a little bit better on main street. That’s not an opinion I’m jacked directly into the trucking and building materials markets and things are picking up a little bit right now in real life. There are lines of people wrapped around a building standing in line to vote where I live in a place that historically has low voter turnout. Nobody is even watching or consuming the legacy media anymore except nerds like us and the very elderly who got frog boiled. That’s because it sucks. I’m watching them the same way I’m watching the other active players on the field because that’s what they are. They remind me of those assholes who fixed the LIBOR to make some of their friends a few million pounds in trading profits. It’s like getting chemo to shave your head to quote Robin Williams. If you value it with a very high multiple and are very kind Fox News is worth 40 billion dollars. Fox News at least is doing it for the right (political) reasons. The other news channels are just copying Fox’s model of reality TV news because that’s what works and they would also like to be worth 40 billion dollars. Don’t worry they aren’t.
But yeah anything they say that aligns with their financial incentives… has to be fully verified to be added to my reality. The goal of my reality is to be as close to a 1:1 copy of actual reality as possible, which I gotta say as life quests go is a real bitch.