The problem is when misrepresentations run wild, the other side can highlight examples and say “see, the left is out there lying and twisting the obvious truth”, and destroy the credibility of all the other material.
Like when Fox News would bash Obama for wearing a Tan suit or fist bumping someone. Any potential legitimate criticism they could relate is undermined by being a laughing stock over such stupid stuff.
With Obama, I suppose I could get it as a strategy because he didn’t supply enough “juicy” material to be substantive, so they didn’t have much alternative but to try to generate stupid outrage. With Trump, he is constantly blatantly showing maliciousness or incompetence, why bother undermining credibility by wasting time highlighting and trying to distort a rare occurrence of him not being incompetent?
The even bigger problem is holding ourselves to a higher standard than they do and setting the expectation that we will always do this while they’ve long ago lowered their standards that they never will.
This results in us wasting time and effort and leads to infighting for messaging that will never reach their side because they already dismissed the article, it is click bait for us not them.
So while we’re over here pearl clutching over a random click bait article, they’ve already moved the conversation forward.
The problem is when misrepresentations run wild, the other side can highlight examples and say “see, the left is out there lying and twisting the obvious truth”, and destroy the credibility of all the other material.
Like when Fox News would bash Obama for wearing a Tan suit or fist bumping someone. Any potential legitimate criticism they could relate is undermined by being a laughing stock over such stupid stuff.
With Obama, I suppose I could get it as a strategy because he didn’t supply enough “juicy” material to be substantive, so they didn’t have much alternative but to try to generate stupid outrage. With Trump, he is constantly blatantly showing maliciousness or incompetence, why bother undermining credibility by wasting time highlighting and trying to distort a rare occurrence of him not being incompetent?
The even bigger problem is holding ourselves to a higher standard than they do and setting the expectation that we will always do this while they’ve long ago lowered their standards that they never will.
This results in us wasting time and effort and leads to infighting for messaging that will never reach their side because they already dismissed the article, it is click bait for us not them.
So while we’re over here pearl clutching over a random click bait article, they’ve already moved the conversation forward.