President Trump didn’t like what he was seeing on his TV screens these past few weeks, so he decided to change the story.
President Donald Trump successfully hijacked the news cycle, using a staged, high-profile “crime crackdown” in Washington, D.C., to push coverage of the Epstein files and the unpopular Republican budget bill out of the spotlight. During the critical 72-hour window from August 11 to 13, nearly two-thirds of all broadcast mentions (65%) amplified and parroted Trump’s preferred frame of chaos, disorder, and crime, while only 27.7% characterized his actions as authoritarian overreach.
Our review of 19,363 broadcast mentions found that, despite the unprecedented federal takeover of a local police force, outlets across the political spectrum rarely engaged in sustained scrutiny of its legality, historical precedent, or the racialized targeting at its core. When news coverage did include authoritarian framing—highlighting Trump’s overreach or the move’s use as a distraction—it was typically limited to brief quotes from local officials or short editorial asides, overshadowed by the frequent repetition of the administration’s talking points. This reflects not only individual editorial choices but a broader structural failure in the press to identify and describe democratic erosion when it is presented in the familiar language of “law and order” and reinforced by carefully staged displays of state power.
This report examines both the mechanics of that diversion and the effects of the media’s framing: two major accountability stories—the handling of the Epstein files and the Republican budget bill—were pushed aside, an extraordinary use of executive power was normalized, and the residents of Washington, D.C., most of them Black and Latino, were positioned as the backdrop for a display that served neither public safety nor democratic governance.
No one's saying the DC takeover is not a newsworthy story. What the authors are saying is that those illegal actions were a deliberate and highly effective means to an end: changing the narrative in the mainstream news. Given how successful it was, MAGAts will probably do it again - which is why this is a story
edit: no, they're just saying the epstein story is more newsworthy.
yeah well if they think he stumbled upon supreme executive authority as a distraction from the crime he wasn't being charged with then their predictive opinion isnt very valuable to me. like, that isn't new, he does that all the time, the firehose of misinformation you're trying to point to: yea this isn't that. this is a fucking invasion of the capital in direct conflict with the constitution. he's not manufacturing a news cycle, he's creating a dictatorship. this was always the plan. the fact that this gets people talking about something other than epstein is incidental, irrelevant, a mere convenience: he controls the supreme court and the government's prosecuting attourneys. Pam Bondi will not be bringing charges against donald trump dude wake the fuck up. they're in on the coup dude. epstein is not the silver bullet any more than comey or mueller or steele or the weird creepy shit we already know about the slimebag before the escalator.
There's not going to be a silver bullet. It's going to be lead and bombs and gas and camps before it's over. Fuck but I wish I was wrong about literally any of this.
Thanks for elaborating. I found this a useful read to challenge any denial I might have about how far down the road to fascism the US already is: https://medium.com/@carmitage/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop-fascism-in-history-the-success-rate-is-0-a665e2e048a2