When it comes to election rigging, a reader has a comment:
Of course Trump doesn’t have a leg to stand on. But just minutes ago I heard a serious, long interview on MPR where they talked oh so gently to a woman who was a Trump supporter, who did not trust the media for information, who thought the voting was rigged. The MPR reporter missed the obvious question about how the government assures us the elections are fair, so that she could then say, well, the gov can’t be trusted. Which leads to, if she does not trust media and does not trust gov, where the hell does she get her information? She sounded “reasonable” in word choice and tone, but she was an idiot. And the media just keeps pandering to these people.
My impression is that they’ve been trained by the conservative media that if some institution isn’t one of a small collection of media, then it’s suspect. Here’s the thing – what will break the faith of a user of a particular website? I see the MPR reporter as being sort of stuck, because you can’t yell someone into sensibility as you see it – they have to find it themselves, or they’ll never have faith in the other side. All I can think is that as the divergence between the reporting and ideology from reality is the only thing that’ll do it, and even then those who are feeding on the lifeblood of the victims will do whatever they think they need to in order to retain the loyalties of those consumers.
Notice I word this so that it could apply to what might be considered to be liberal news sources as well – I firmly believe in digging at the foundations of beliefs, and this is something that should be done with any media, comparing what it reports with reality and ask whether they are congruent enough to trust as “best efforts.”
