Milking Donald Trump’s ghost

| 9:09 am EST February 7, 2021
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Now that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been removed from House committees, I’ve seen multiple mainstream media pundits suggest that we all simply stop focusing on her at all. I find this notion disingenuous, and frankly telling about what the media’s motives always ultimately end up being.

For starters, Greene is still a member of the House of Representatives. Despite her few minutes of half baked quasi-contrition during her hearing, she’s still saying and doing highly offensive things. She’s still a high office holder who fairly recently called for the assassination of other high office holders. But because she got a proverbial slap on the wrist, we’re just supposed to pretend she doesn’t exist now?

More to the point, it was the House Democrats who had to take the unprecedented step of removing Greene from committees, after House Republican leadership refused to do it. About 95% of House Republicans then voted to protect her. She’s still very much the face of the Republican Congress. Yet some in the mainstream media want us to suddenly move on from her?

The truly telling part is that this is the same mainstream media that’s still trying to convince us that Donald Trump is still about to jump out at us from behind every dark corner. Nevermind that Trump is now broken, unwilling to fight for himself, and irrelevant. The media has suddenly decided that we should stop talking about Greene and other current Republicans who are actually still doing things, and… go back to talking about Trump? Really?

This brings us back to the fact that, due to the financial pressures involved and the millions of dollars on the line, the mainstream media ultimately ends up basing its major editorial decisions and narrative choices on one thing and one thing only: ratings.

This leads me to conclude that the media must be disappointed in the ratings that it’s been getting while Marjorie Taylor Greene was the focus, and that it’s now hoping to somehow shift the focus back to Trump, in the hope of juicing those ratings.

Here’s the thing, though. Palmer Report barely mentions Trump anymore, as the vast majority of our articles are now about more relevant topics, and our traffic levels are doing just fine. If the media is so worried about ratings, maybe it should focus less on trying to calculate its narratives, and instead just focus on what’s going on. The media doesn’t need to keep Trump’s ghost around in order to get people to stay tuned in. It only thinks it does.