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This is the podcast for the week of February 20th,

20, 2006. It's not safe for work. Recorded live from the Cornfield Resistance,

where story beats charts every time. It's the professional left with drift glass and blue gal.

Today we're going to talk about how to win, how to lose, and how to tell the difference.

Sometimes it's hard.

It's kind of hard sometimes.

And to start us out, we pulled a pertinent quote from a Fortune magazine article published

November 7, 2016. That's the before time because it's one day before the 2016 election. And you don't

talk about those days, but we are. The title of the article is how Donald Trump took advantage of a broken media landscape.

And it lays out the flaws and failures of the media of 2016, which have widened into chasms and catastrophes over the past decades.

The bottom line-driven obsession with ratings and revenue.

But there's something in there about the empty Trump lectern also.

The willingness to publish facts and bullshit side by side,

to treat them both with equal seriousness in the name of fairness.

Also, if Republicans go too far, they say that that's controversial.

That's right.

Very controversial.

The reality that all the media's craven motives, blind spots, and group think biases were there long before

Trump ever showed up. He just exploited the hell out of them. Yes, he did. And the quote we

pulled is from a tweet by Clay Shirky. It's from July 22nd, 2016. Quote, seeing my timeline during the convention last night, that, wow, that's a

...