President-elect Vladimir Trump and news manipulation

[Rudy Canoza]

Alexey Kovalev, a well-respected Russian journalist familiar with
autocratic manipulation of the press by Putin, has this to say about Trump:

This man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the
news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules—which
he can change at any time without any notice. You can’t—in Putin’s
case—campaign to vote him out of office. Your readership is
dwindling because ad budgets are shrinking—while his ratings are
soaring, and if you want to keep your publication afloat, you’ll
have to report on everything that man says as soon as he says it,
without any analysis or fact-checking, because 1) his fans will not
care if he lies to their faces; 2) while you’re busy picking his
lies apart, he’ll spit out another mountain of bullshit and you’ll
be buried under it.

https://boingboing.net/2017/01/12/after-trumps-press-conferenc.html


That one item is key: "his fans [scooter, gak, 'nobody' (apt), et al.]
will not care if he lies to their faces." That's exactly right. The
deplorables *want* to be lied to.