Democrats must learn to use the media and control the narrative to simply explain, not change, effective policies.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/11/democrats-must-learn-to-control.html

Recovery came in the form of the Biden Administration. Steps were taken to resolve supply chain issues, distribute vaccines, and provide resources to businesses, saving literally millions of jobs that would have been lost otherwise. More jobs were lost under Trump than any previous Presidential administration since Hoover. The recovery, something which required, and got, leadership from Joe Biden, saved most of those jobs, and his economic expansion, including the infrastructure bill, added even more.

On top of that, when global inflation affected the American economy, we had a leader who stepped up and took action against that as well. As a result, the effects of inflation were not nearly as bad in the United States as they were in most other places.

And as another result, few Americans are aware of any of this. They are either self-isolated in their own information bubble, or they are bored with politics, economics and "all that stuff," and pay little attention. And even if they really had wanted to find out what was going on, their limited attention span wouldn't have allowed them to stay tuned in long enough to get past all the Trump news they were hearing and seeing every day.

If an honest survey could be conducted and reported, it would find that Trump, as an ex-President, got ten times the coverage that the sitting President of the United States got in the mainstream media. I counted, one night, back in 2021, during the Congressional investigation into Trump's incitement of the insurrection against the Capitol and against Congress and the American people, during the one hour broadcast of one of my favorite commentators, Lawrence O'Donnell. He's not Trump-friendly by any means. The name "Trump" or "Donald Trump" came out of his lips 34 times in that one hour broadcast, about once every two minutes.

In resigning ourselves to the fact that we have lost our free press, Democrats must figure out not only how to simplify the narrative so people actually understand how it works for them, but they must do things to get enough attention to make media outlets turn their cameras off the orange headed buffoon onto Democratic party candidates. I know it's not in our nature, but the only way we're going to be able to do any kind of mass saturation of the media with a clear, easy to understand message, is to do things to get the kind of attention Trump gets.

We must consider the mainstream media propaganda, not journalism, and use it that way and not feel guilty about it. Only then will we be able to explain, in the simplest of terms, how much more we have to offer the American people by making government work well, than they do, by destroying it.

[RockRaven]

1. That second to last sentence is the key issue.

Having principles and so forth is great, but worthless if you lose. Say whatever you have to, to whoever you have to, to win. You can have your principles back once you are in office.

The ability to do good in government doesn't come from being right but from having power. Prioritizing anything other than winning is putting the cart before the horse.

[Ndp5]

2. Hating on the press will solve nothing

Many journalists are actually relatively progressive — most are likely to identify as Dems or Independents: https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journalist-findings

It seems like this person is slamming all journalists, or at least all “mainstream media” journalists, for the behavior of a small cadre of TV news idiots in Washington. Most of those TV outlets are moribund anyway. Don’t join Republicans in trying to degrade the press.

I don’t think it’s fair to argue that if you just speak real slowly, you can get voters to ignore high grocery prices. Harris at least had the right idea in that she acknowledged the problem on the trail and proposed a solution. Talking down to people and arguing with them about whether or not they’re struggling (and the supposedly right wing “mainstream media” did both in the run-up to the election) doesn’t fly.

[lees1975]

7. If Harris convinced any voters Democrats would do something about high grocery prices, she'd have won.

This isn't a short term solution. Grocery and gas prices went up under Biden. He came up with a plan, introduced a bill in Congress that he got passed, and watched the fed and regulated interest rates. He said it would take 18 months to two years to completely get inflation back down, he talked about the cause and effect of what was happening globally, his economic advisors in the commerce department did a great job of explaining exactly how his plan would work. On top of that, he tried some short term strategies, like selling off a chunk of the national oil reserves to boost the market,buying back replacement oil at a much lower price, pushed to get American production to capacity in spite of a labor and equipment shortage,.

Now, where did I get this information? Mostly off of MSNBC, from NPR news reports, Democracy Now, Pacifica radio, the Texas Observer, and Common Dreams.

People still blamed Biden for the prices of groceries going up, for gas prices and still had the impression that the economy was bad in spite of every indicator showing otherwise, including their own wages going up.

Now, we did have people who would contradict this, including Buttigieg, who would go on Fox and contradict it in the simplest terms, baffling and frustrating their reporters. We need to convince about 150,000 swing voters in any three of seven swing states.

https://thecycle.substack.com/p/why-democrats-failed-to-save-democracy?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=242338&post_id=151751852&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=nezwq&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

[Ndp5]

9. Where are those swing voters likely to get trusted news?

It looks like you get news from both mainstream (NPR) and openly left-leaning media outlets. My point was just that people should not trash all mainstream media because they are upset with how much free airtime Trump got. Those decisions were made by a small group of people at TV outlets that are on the fast track to irrelevance.

I agree that Republicans have successfully branded Democrats as the party of elitists, as the graph at that substack link suggests. That’s part of a decades-long effort to shift middle- and lower-class resentment from economic elites (where it belongs) to cultural elites. But mainstream outlets and especially local newspapers have been countervailing forces, not accessories in that project.

Biden wasn’t on the ballot, and Harris had only a few short months to get her message out. She also didn’t do many mainstream media interviews in the beginning. I think the answer is a longer campaign with more interviews, not turning the objective media into a Democratic PR tool. How would you even propose to do that?

I am sympathetic to arguments that too many people mistakenly turn to TikTok and X looking for reliable information. Or that Fox News is destroying the country. Or that we need to protect mainstream newspapers from billionaire owners with business interests before the federal government. But I don’t think tearing down the mainstream press, of which Fox is not a part, does any good in the long run.

[J_William_Ryan]

3. "We must consider the mainstream media propaganda...and use it that way..."

How exactly – by turning on a Democratic firehose of lies and disinformation as Republicans do.

All Democrats have to work with are facts and the truth – both of which the voters clearly care nothing about.

[lees1975]

10. No, but we don't put any information out like a firehose at all, and that's the problem.

That's the place to start, making sure we have visibility in the same way we know Trump is going to get into just about every newscast every day. Then, keep the message simple and clear. How in the world did we have the single best Presidency since Johnson, in terms of achievement and accomplishment, and most voters were oblivious. A President can call a news conference and make all the networks carry it, why didn't we see that during this administration? Once Jen Psaki left, it went silent.

[Baitball Blogger]

4. Yup. We've been talking about that

For quite a while. But, how do we do it? Clearly not with podcasters that take 15 minutes to get to the point. More like snap connections between events and facts.

[mopinko]

6. make pete dnc chair.

[lees1975]

8. That would be an excellent start.

He did a great job of this, about as well as anyone had.

[Tetrachloride]

5. i am sure that the article will resonate with the audience

in the next century