Trump is an idiot, as shown by him questioning his own victory. I've never thought it a good way to win people over by insulting them, but Charles if you're so smart why did you lose?

Lol @ the Stranger now trying to jump onboard the MUH FAKE NEWS bandwagon. You guys have no sense of irony do you?

"Look at how its population has declined over the past 40 years. Look at where thousands of its factory jobs went to. But also look at who the city voted for: for Clinton."

May be, Clinton won in Detroit because most of those screwed out of jobs and community have left (more than half the population left)

Both the Dems and the Reps caused the crash of 2008. It couldn't have happened without the changes clinton made.

But yeah fake news...good thing we have the stranger that reports using their gut and not the facts.

Charles you clam to be a philosopher and a student of economics, why do you completely overlook income inequality?

A hack who works for the fakest of all the fake news calling out fake news...

http://i.imgur.com/hG7FDtJ.gifv

A major frustration I have is with people creating a false equivalency, claiming liberals and conservatives live in their own equally invalid bubbles. Horse puckey. This is not liberals reading the New York Times and conservatives reading the Wall Street Journal, this is liberals reading the New York Times and conservatives reading Breitbart. The former is one of the best and most reliable sources of information in the world, the latter is white nationalist publication (though that barely scratches the surface of their prejudices). You don't acquiesce to bigotry, you fight it.

You need a big glass of scotch and a nap, Charles....

Still waiting to hear the Drumpf supporting folks on this threat to explain the millions of illegal votes. What the hell was he talking about? Where is evidence of this? Does it bother you that he is speaking out of his ass?

@8 these have always existed. National inquirer?

The problem is more and more people are moving away from traditional news sources that have high editorial standards and to other sources. But newspapers aren't helping it. In order to get page hits they produce less fact check pieces and more opinion bases pieces cause it much cheaper and gets people upset and upset people comment and refresh pages driving ad revenue.

The stranger could send a reporter to the rust belt to actually report, or to the small towns in WA that have been hurt by free trade and automation.

But instead they produce pieces like this that make statements with no actual reporting.

And as our traditional turn to more opinion based pieces and put them in the same spot as any actual reporting, they train their readers to accept opinions as fact. Which leads to people being less informed and more susceptible to full out fake news sites.

We used to know the difference between the ny times and the national inquirer, but now they're slowly becoming the same.

"Traditional media"

@9 - The "millions of illegal votes" lie is actually a preparing of the ground. It's an intentional distraction, and a set up.
1.) It implies that "urban blacks" are somehow voting illegally, allowing racists to believe it easily.
2.) Points the accusation of "voter fraud" in the wrong --and impossible-- direction (double voting, voting for dead people, etc.), and importantly,
3.) Sets up the ball for the GOP Congress to spike it with more actual vote suppression ...as has been systematically investigated since 2000... by using "caging lists", and a system called "CrossCheck" which drops people from the rolls when they have a name that is merely a 2/3rds match with another name (eg. Marcus T. Wills & Marcus C. Wills ... both get dropped).

This is the only way that the Reps can win elections now. Stopping the higher population 'blue' cities from voting successfully.

These are two things that can be true simultaneously: we live in a bubble and there is no 'understanding' the deplorables. I grew up in a small town, although technically not in the deplorable heartland. There's nothing to 'understand'. The only thing that can be done is to wait around. Reality inevitably bites those in the ass who refuse to believe in it. Unfortunately we are all on board this train ride to hell. Just like in 08 though, the only way it is going to stop is when it hits something (or goes off a cliff).

@10, 13 - Right. And the quality shared by "viral" newsbites is "emotionally dramatic". This gets the 'shocking' stuff passed around much faster than the boring, pedantic, fact-based, detailed investigative pieces that take :20+ minutes to read. Nobody reads any more, they just skim.

It's said that "Bad news travels 3x faster than good news" --- now the bad news has accelerated even faster thanks to high emotional content and the internet.

Here's some direct reporting from a Rust Belt journalist who lives there.
A Dark View from Flyover Country.
One salient point: "locally based journalism has all but disappeared. In the resulting information vacuum the influence of inflammatory cable and right-wing national media...is huge."

most stupidest

lol

Charles is right on this one. Don't patronize idiots i.e. Trump voters.

Many are very stupid and enjoy it that way. There is no way to elevate them as they are extremely happy with their condition.

The woman in Florida voted for Trump and is hoping to keep Obamacare (since she has some serious debilitating disease) is a perfect example of Darwin.

@13 i agree, the stranger does do good reporting. Thats why i stick around. But i'm so pissed at these opinion pieces that comment on fake news based on gut theories. If i was upset about fake news and writing a piece about it i'd make sure i'm using facts.

Where is the line between news and opinion on slog? It used to be clear in the paper days, opinion had its own section after the news section, and there was clear guidelines. But now in the internet the two are blended together without clear delineation.

As the old saying goes, "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on" - a very old saying indeed, going back in some variation more than 300 years. Lies, by their very nature, are easy to believe, because they reinforce opinions and positions the person already believes, and thus no thought is required to accept them; whereas truth requires research, verification, contemplation, and analysis - activities far too many lack the cognitive ability, let alone the desire, to pursue.

Charles, check out this WA Post 11/22 story; it's about economics, Charles, not about the fake reason that fake news lost the election for the Dems. Also, the fact that Hilary Clinton utterly failed to inspire voters to even get out and vote. The tiny slivers of blue on each coast, made up of 500 counties, were all for Clinton, and that's about where 64% of the nation's economic output is. The 2,600 counties in the middle went for Trump and that's where stagnation and a rusting economy lies. The divide is economic, and it's getting worse, of course. The urban centers all went for Clinton, except Phoenix and Fort Worth. I bet if the 2600 counties were doing well economically, Trump would have lost. But, they are not. The divide can't sustain, as the cost of living in the urban centers is growing far too fast to sustain and the stagnation in the other areas is a sludge. We can point fingers and call names, but, after all these years, it's still the economy stupid (not you, Charles, but all of us)....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk…

@21 What do counties have to do with anything?

There are counties out there which went for Obama twice and then went to Romney. And there's probably some insight to be found in why this was the case for each one. But the story of this election is that reliable republicans voted reliably for the republican. This is not exactly earth-shaking news. If there's any lesson to be learned its that there is no depth to which the GOP can sink which will alienate rich the well educated, economically secure people who make up the core of the Republican voting coalition.

#22, read the Post story, and also consider how few Dems voted this time, compared to 2008 and 2012, the Obama coalition is called the OBAMA coalition for a reason and was not transferable. Yes republicans voted for Trump, but fewer than voted for Romney or McCain. It wasn't that Trump had a landslide, it was that the Dems stayed home in droves. I think this is because our candidate simply failed to inspire any passion except calling Trump and his followers names. A Sanders, economic warfare message campaign would have fared better. Simply saying, Repubs bad and evil etc, doesn't address the why (economics) that a Trump even had a chance. We, repubs, dems, greens, get nowhere fast flipping one another off.

When I was a kid in the rural South, working folks would regularly relocate to where the jobs were, and those were often urban areas like Cincinnati, Atlanta, Detroit. In the 1980s, the common practice of moving for work slowed dramatically among the less-educated. They've been staying put in economically depressed areas for decades now, getting nuttier and meaner by they year. They are Trump's base and, as Charles correctly points out, there is simply no reasoning with them. They would prefer to burn down the American experiment entirely, and now they're on the cusp of doing just that. We've never been closer to losing it all. It's time to fight or be swept away by history.

my bet is that the general quality of life will improve over the course of the next 10 to 15 yrs [for real americans]. It WILL be great. contrary to the fears of socialists, govt will continue to expand and affirmative action will work better than ever for minorities. somewhere around the twenty year mark, following the most tremendous state funeral procession in herstory there will be a total collapse [economic, environmental, and god all at once] and everyone will finally die the miserable death that they once suspected awaited them.

@25
I post while high too..

@25

"but forced democrats to keep lead in the water of flint and other places in michigan..."

I live in Michigan, near Detroit.
Gov. Snyder (r) appointed an 'emergency manager' in Flint, and the em switched Flint's water source from the Detroit system to the Flint river, which is highly corrosive due to years of pollution.
The corrosive water ate into Flint's lead pipes.
It was reported as a 'cost saving measure', but was in fact a political power grab.
It is a much more complicated story than the national media has made it out to be, but one fact is clear.
The Republicans caused the Flint water crisis.

Darwin. It's only in the blink of an evolutionary eye that true mobility has finally allowed the fittest and smartest to leave the backwater hellholes of narrow-mindedness, bigotry and stupidity, for really the first time ever, and join others like themselves in the blue zones. And intelligence is a highly desirable and heritable trait. The smart usually beget the smart; the stupid usually beget the stupid. Voila. So hang in there, stupidity is a very poor survival strategy, and as I think Darwin would agree, doomed to failure. Ask a neanderthal.

Amen.

@30 I don't know about that theory. The stupid breed like crazy.