GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy did not back down Sunday when questioned about comments he made during a campaign stop in Iowa Friday, calling Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) part of the “modern KKK.”
“I stand by what I said to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” Ramaswamy said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
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For one simple and depressing reason - people click on it. That’s the dopamine button for modern media outlets online; those clicks are the cash register ringing.
If you want to figure out a way to elevate the discourse you have to disrupt the payment model - at the end of the day people do what gets them paid. Doubly so when the harm it causes is anonymized by operating in corporate aggregates.
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Of course not, that isn’t what I mean. I’m taking about why media in general reports as “straight news” the inflammatory blathering of political figures. Whether you as the reader agree with it or not, these kind of statements in headlines get the publisher clicks.
Clicks == revenue for for the media site, so they are incentivized to provide more content like that. Politicians need exposure more than just about anything, so they tend more towards that kind of language in part to get greater exposure through those venues.
I don’t think people posting content like this to aggregators like lemmy are in that incentivizing loop directly, but users engaging with the content even if they hate does incentivize the behavior further(albeit in a very small, incremental way).
Underrated comment. Can’t upvote more.
I think you answered your own question. He’s playing the Trump bit. Saying extreme things to get news headlines and people talking about him. And it’s working to some extent.
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Because the media learned nothing from trump
Or worse, they learned that a bigoted blowhard is good for ratings.
Best response is to down vote and ignore it.
Yeah I’ll start doing that, and start saying to people that talk about that you don’t care. It’s annoying how predictable we are as humans sometimes
People and the media didn’t learn from trump that they should not feed the crazy
media didn’t learn
Oh they learned alright. They do this not because they didn’t learn their lesson but because they did. Actual journalism and reporting is ALWAYS second to shit articles that are wrong in order to be the first one out the door, click bait the article title, showcase the fascists for the rage bait, etc.
They exist to make money and so the lessons learned revolve solely around finance. Whey would they learn anything else? This shit is working for them
This little shit is so smarmy.
I can’t stop calling him Ramasmarmy! Every time I see that asshole grin on his face.
I was going with Ramaslimy, but I might like smarmy better.
I like it! I’ll probably end up doing the same now lol.
During his Friday appearance in Iowa, Ramaswamy accused Pressley, the first Black woman elected to represent Massachusetts in Congress, of racism and compared her to “modern grand wizards” of the Ku Klux Klan for comments she made in 2019, saying: “We don’t need any more Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice.” Pressley clarified her remarks at the time, noting on social media that she “speaking to the collective impact of lifting up one’s lived experience, whatever that is.”
Pressley, a progressive elected to the House in 2018, shot back on Saturday, calling the comments “harmful.”
“We typically don’t engage in these bad-faith attacks but yesterday a line was crossed. A GOP candidate referred to Ayanna as ‘a modern grand wizard of the KKK’ because she speaks out against racial injustice,” Pressley’s team said in a fundraising pitch. “This is backwards and harmful, but that is the point.”
You conveniently left out what immediately followed that quote in the article:
But on Sunday, Ramaswamy did not back down when he was repeatedly questioned about the comparison by Bash.
“I think it is the same spirit to say that I can look at you and based on just your skin color, that I know something about the content of your character, that I know something about the content of the viewpoints you’re allowed to express,” Ramaswamy said, calling the rhetoric “divisive.”
Every attack is a confession
What Pressley said has nothing to do with the KKK.
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This guy is fast proving he’s just a male MTG: shock jock politician trying bait reasonable people into engaging him and legitimizing him.
And of course, the news outlets will spread every provocative thing he says far and wide for clicks.
Fuck everything.
He’s just calling Pressley a poser because the OG KKK votes Republican.
Useless babies whining about each other. What is this the GOP? Embarrassing.
Why does anyone care what this clown has to say? He’s irrelevant. Just ignore his bullshit and don’t let him get to you.
It is so weird watching national politics being conducted in terms more fitting to a playground argument. And not just in the US, we’re getting a lot of it in the UK too. And I’m assuming it is similar everywhere the fash and their fellow travellers have gained some kind of platform in national politics.
There were never “grown ups” in charge. But I miss them at least pretending to be serious. Or maybe it’s better that they’re so laughably bad, instead of cloaking equally dire arguments in more convincing rhetoric?
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All these people have dinner with and fuck each other behind the scenes while they entertain us with bullshit attacks toward each other.
