MrChris wrote:
Curiosity wrote:
God I hate the role of the media in politics.
What's it done now? The reporting on Abbott's utter incompetence is fair isn't it?
Not even remotely. It's not even close to being in the same vicinity as the half of the world in which fair resides.
It wasn't even in the top five stupidest things done that day on the campaign trail, but it fits the narrative and allows the media to ignore any and all actual issues to focus on, "Let's all laugh at Diane Abbott".
It ignores that Theresa May did worse things even on the same day. It ignores that Abbott did the same interview numerous times throughout the day and made one (admittedly silly) mistake. It ignores whether the policy was good or bad. It ignores whether it is better policy than that currently in place. It furthers the belief that the most important thing about running a country is the ability to drone on through a hundred interviews without putting out a single thing worth saying. It explicitly encourages the parroting of stupid, meaningless lies such as 'Strong and Stable Leadership' and moves politics further and further from being about issues and purely about personalities.
The Tories are likely to win in a landslide despite not having a policy other than going for a harder Brexit than the BNP wanted. Despite utter governmental incompetence in things that actually matter. Despite bringing about the biggest crises in education and healthcare in my lifetime. They are in a position where they can literally do whatever they want, but instead of trying to hold them to account or ask what they actually want to do, people would rather laugh at the silly lady who made a mistake in one bloody interview.
I'm not a fan of Abbott, but she takes an insane amount of flak for things that others would get away with. It seems spectacularly unfair to me that you could come up with amazing policies that would change the world and save lives, but if you fuck up one interview out of many you give on the same day you'd just get laughed out of town - but only if your face doesn't fit.
Just attack the damn policies if they're so incompetent and terrible. I think Corbyn is a shambles at organising things, and he's not be my first choice as Prime Minister, but if you dissociate him from his policies, those policies are actually really popular.
But nobody engages with policies any more. They're somehow unimportant. And Abbott's fuck up is just one example of this; a symptom of a wider malaise. We've all ballsed up something at work in our time. If you're like Johnson, Trump, Gove, Hunt, May, you get away with it. If you're Abbott, less so.
I'm just so exasperated with it all. Truth and facts and policies and all that boring stuff that actually matters take a backseat to whatever makes a better sound bite.
The policy itself could be awful; it could be great. Nobody seems to care, because the weakest and least stable government in recent memory need to have time to tell you how strong and stable they are.