Why the media has broken down in the age of Trump

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 4:06 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why the media has broken down in the age of Trump
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend Geoff Goodfellow.  DLH]

Why the media has broken down in the age of Trump
By Michael Goodwin
Jul 1 2017
<
http://nypost.com/2017/07/01/why-the-media-has-broken-down-in-the-age-of-trump/
>

Since President Trump was elected, the media landscape has divided and
hardened more than ever. Even the once-unimpeachable New York Times has
been guilty of “fake news,” while on Tuesday CNN had to retract an article
that slimed a Trump aide based on flimsy reporting. In April, The Post’s
Michael Goodwin delivered this speech at a Hillsdale College National
Leadership Seminar in Atlanta, analyzing how we got here — and how
journalism can survive.

I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t
always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were
trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in
a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that,
we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news
organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s
election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream
media puts both thumbs on the scale — that most of what you read, watch and
listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen
anything like it. Not even close.

It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to
do that myself. I grew up at the New York Times, so I’m familiar with the
species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of
the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War
movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The
deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted
than government — and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford
in “All the President’s Men.” Ever since, young people became journalists
because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep
Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to
bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into
the journalism cake.

During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of
Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the
reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m
not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way
most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that
compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news,
and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person
afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say,
“Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the
conclusion that every problem has a government solution.

The rest of that journalistic ethos — “afflict the comfortable” — leads to
the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that
government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and
for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable
regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give
sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives
Matter.

A new dimension

I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential
campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened. This was not naïve
liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in
modern times had seen anything like it. As with grief, there were several
stages. In the beginning, Donald Trump’s candidacy was treated as an
outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn’t a serious candidate and
should be treated as a circus act. But television executives quickly made a
surprising discovery: The more they put Trump on the air, the higher their
ratings climbed. Ratings are money. So news shows started devoting hours
and hours simply to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.

As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The
candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people
to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the
game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the
press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial
that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.

Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something
extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the
smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only
when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up
primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious.

[snip]

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