Date: 2025-08-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028246
MEDIA
UNBALANCE IN MODERN MEDIA!
As Markets Whipsaw, Conservative Media Shrugs
Many conservative websites have either ignored the
recent stock declines or framed them in a positive way.
UNBALANCE IN MODERN MEDIA!
As Markets Whipsaw, Conservative Media Shrugs
Many conservative websites have either ignored the
recent stock declines or framed them in a positive way.
People on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange are surrounded by data on screens mounted to the walls.
As President Trump’s unpredictable and halting tariff policies rattled investors this week, many of his most loyal supporters in the media chose to barely mention the news.
Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/business/media/stock-market-conservative-media.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I am 85 years old, and trying better to understand what has to happen to have a 'better' world.
Solving international disputes with 'war' seems like a 'bad idea' ... but essentially it is what the world's leaders do all the time.
When the UK declared war against Nazi Germany in 1939, there was reference to a 'just war' ... a war that needed to be fought, because the alternative was unacceptable!
At some level, the modern world is more complex than the world of 1940 ... but in many ways it is very much the same.
Great powers still struggle for supremacy ... and for someone of my age ... what is going on today has a lot of echoes of the past.
And, frankly, for me, echoes of exploitation by the United States that were obscene in the 1940s may well be now, under Trump, far worse now in the 2020s than at any time in the past!
Americans probably will not understand what I am talking about ... but older British will understand.
Trump had been a greedy 'SOB' all his business life, and as the Chief Executive of 'America Inc.' he is doing all he can to 'Make America Great Again' by 'screwing over' any and all its business partners around the world.
Whether this will work in 2025 the way it has worked in the past is an open question.
But I do know, that the world will 'take down' the USA at the first opportunity, and American needs to be prepared. For the past 80 years the United States has been able to 'rule the roost' but that era is over, and Trump needs to wake up to the new realities before he does inrepairable damage!
This gets even more complicated because of the unusual role that Elon Musk is playing and what function DOGE is going to play in the restrucuting of the US Government in the weeks and months ahead. It is likely to be good for Musk ... but otherwise it is anybody's guess!
During the last few days, the US stock market has been in serious free fall. Will the market recover?
This is not going to be a 'political question' but about economics. I am not at all sure that Trump will get this one right!
Peter Burgess
Many conservative websites have either ignored the recent stock declines or framed them in a positive way.
Written by Ken Bensinger
March 13, 2025
Nervous investors seeking news about the plunging markets on Monday afternoon would have been out of luck if they turned to the websites of The New York Post, The Daily Caller, One America News or The Blaze. Not one of those right-leaning outlets featured articles about the sell-off as the closing bell rang, cementing Wall Street’s steepest decline of the year.
And Fox Business Network, which pledges to “deliver content focused on investing, optimism and the American dream,” placed coverage of the drop on its site below a story about temporary outages on Elon Musk’s social media site, X.
As President Trump’s unpredictable and halting tariff policies rattled investors this week, many of his most loyal supporters in the media and on Capitol Hill chose to barely mention the news — or to frame it as a potentially good thing.
“Profits are still rising. It’s very hard for me to see a recession,” said Larry Kudlow, the Fox Business host and former Trump adviser, who filmed his show in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, on Monday afternoon. “I’d kind of suggest people keep their powder dry and pay attention to a well-thought-out economic plan that will indeed make America great again.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he regularly pointed to the stock market as a kind of scoreboard for his policies. But in recent weeks he has often refused to dispel worries of a slowdown or recession, telling the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, “I hate to predict things like that,” and calling this moment “a period of transition.” He added that the United States should look to China’s long-term-planning approach to economics, rather than the quarterly-results focus of Wall Street. “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he said.
That new position was quickly echoed by some online influencers.
Jack Posobiec, who recently traveled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Europe, dismissed the fears, encouraging people to “pump the brakes” on their financial jitters in a podcast appearance on Tuesday. Chaya Raichik, a right-wing activist known for her Libs of TikTok account, posted on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s economic positions were “exactly what I voted for.” (She didn’t mention the declining stock market.)
Lawmakers joined in, too. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, claimed the retrenchment was overdue.
“We were probably overbloated with the stock market,” he told Mr. Kudlow of Fox Business soon after Monday’s market close. “I don’t think President Trump needs to be concerned about it.”
That remark was in sharp contrast to Mr. Tuberville’s past feelings about financial gyrations. Last August, when stocks suffered a similar one-day decline, he took to X to decry President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of the economy. “We need steady leadership,” Mr. Tuberville said at the time.
Some conservative outlets expressed concern about the market shock, with the Fox News host John Roberts, for example, noting on Tuesday that “the Dow is 1,500 points below where it was when Trump took office.”
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“That’s not a good look,” he added.
But the right’s overall unperturbed response to the stock market illustrates how fully many have absorbed the party line when it comes to the administration’s agenda, even if it hurts their own pocketbooks. And those who did seem to notice the declines have been bending over backward to place blame elsewhere.
“This is happening because we have a president with the balls to undo a globalist economic agenda that’s decimated American wages and quality of life,” Rob Schmitt, a host on Newsmax, said on X. “This is the pain that comes from real change.”
The Fox News host Will Cain likened the country to a person addicted to heroin who was trying to quit.
“Our economy has been addicted to government spending,” Mr. Cain said during his afternoon show on Monday. “The withdrawal of that government spending can send the patient, our economy, into a health crisis. But, ultimately, it has to withdraw to once again get healthy.”
Others rose in support of Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric car company, which has lost just shy of half its value, or more than $750 billion, in total market capitalization since mid-December, including a 15 percent drop on Monday alone.
“His company and his products are under constant attack, all because he is daring to expose waste, fraud and abuse, and auditing the federal government,” the Fox News host Sean Hannity said on Monday. He made no mention of prolonged sales declines for Tesla in Europe, Australia and California, but pledged to buy a souped-up Model S sedan as a “gesture on my part.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump followed his lead, committing to buy a Tesla “as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” He later held a news conference with Mr. Musk outside the White House featuring a row of Tesla vehicles, and selected a red Model S for himself. “When somebody is a great patriot, they shouldn’t be hurt,” he said.
Not everyone on the political right seemed quite so blasé about the market’s downturn.
Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Mr. Trump during his first administration, called the tariffs “misguided” over the weekend, adding that “the economy looks like it might be headed to a recession.”
Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, cautioned the public not to bury its head in the sand. “The market indexes are a distillation of sentiment,” he said. “When the markets tumble like this in response to tariffs, it pays to listen.”
But that pushback was largely drowned out by those eager to downplay the news.
“If you read the morning headlines, you’d think the economy — shoot, the whole nation — was going to hell in a handbasket,” Dagen McDowell, a Fox Business host, said late on Monday. She called talk of a recession “fear mongering.”
Ben Shapiro, a conservative who frequently expounds on economic matters to his 7.23 million subscribers on YouTube, laid out the stakes in purely political terms on Tuesday afternoon.
“If President Trump is blamed for an economic downturn, the effects of that could be disastrous,” he said. “Signals matter an awful lot when it comes to the economy these days.”
The Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
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- Medical Research at Columbia: Dozens of medical and scientific studies are ending or at risk of ending, leaving researchers scrambling to find alternative funding.
- U.S. Military Academies: President Trump moved to stack the boards overseeing U.S. military service academies with conservative activists and political allies, including Michael T. Flynn and Walt Nauta, who were charged in connection with earlier investigations of Trump and his presidential campaign.
- E.P.A.: The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research department, firing chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
- Law Firms Questioned: Trump’s acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to 20 law firms requesting information about their diversity, equity and inclusion-related employment practices.
- V.A.: The Department of Veterans Affairs is phasing out gender-affirming medical treatments for veterans, including hormone treatment for patients newly diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the V.A. said.
- J.F.K. Assassination: Trump said that officials planned to disclose a trove of classified government files about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and suggested that there would be no redactions this time.
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