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Trump admits he didn’t have to tear down East Wing for ballroom, but just wanted to
(piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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He wanted to make distracting headlines, and he got them.
"Distracting headlines" as a canard gets a bit old. Everything is a distraction from everything else, because we have a heavily monopolized mass media and a shrinking pool of investigative journalists with any kind of budget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#United_States
When you had twice as many newspapers and half as many people, the idea of "distracting headlines" was more a matter of consumer choice (you could read serious news at the New York Times or junk pop-media at the New York Post). Now media functions as a cartel, with papers all echoing one another on topics of the day. Or deliberately remaining silent on embarrassments the business community owners would rather not talk about.
This isn't a "Trump" problem, though. Its a problem of consolidation and privatization on a national scale.
Well, look at lemmy anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism. Pitchforks and torches. People don't want to pay for quality journalism, do they get whatever billionaires want to feed them.
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.
What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
"Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post" is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
I don't thing the likes of wsj, nyt or similar are "random newspapers", and they still get hate for asking for money. Bezos finds that useful.
Cracked has an article that points how Trump does know some things to a very high level. One of those things is how media attention works and also a complete and absolute lack of shame.
Him admitting that he tore down part of the white house because he just didn't like it and could have built around it is exactly those two things. He wanted to distract people and he legit does not give a damn.