Embed from Getty Images Why Hating the Media Could Make the Difference in November The winning candidate may be the one who most successfully stirs the public’s mistrust of journalists and journalism. by Neal Gabler As the political pundits keep reminding us, this might be called the “hate” election. Both major parties’ presumptive nominees, Donald Trump…
The terrible thing about this article is that it does not include a critique of the media from the left. There is a reason more and more people are getting their news from websites: American corporate media is owned by, and beholden to, the same people who can afford to hire lobbyists to corrupt our legislators, who can afford to hire lawyers to tip our scales of justice, and who can afford to dictate what is said and by whom. They are the same people who provide intimate information about us to the government, unfairly malign anyone who dares to disrupt the status quo, and mislead us in many ways great and small. You couldn’t get a succinct and fair account of the crimes committed by the ruling class in regard to the mortgage crisis and economic blowout of 2007-2009. We still don’t have a mea culpa about nonexistent WMDs or the false justifications for the Iraq War. And in many cases, particularly in the ISP realm, they have a monopoly position and ride roughshod over the public they are supposed to serve. Everyone is evaluating what they read, hear, and see by the MSM in the same way that Soviet citizens digested Pravda and Izvestia. It’s all so much bullshit.
If what the media is doing here feels vaguely familiar, that is because it echoes our politics. The media is triangulating to try to keep as many people in readership as possible. It works in neither. The repudiation by the Republican base is wired into their DNA and reinforced by Fox News. The MSM is actually somewhat worse off for capitulating even in polling of Republicans. The decline in trust is marginal. There wasn’t much room to fall with the right and they suffered the hit despite re-defining truth as the half way point between reality and insanity. Most of the decline in confidence is in the political center and on the left. There the recognition that what is being reported has become unanchored from facts and resembles nothing more than reality TV has done the most statistical damage. A pivot back to objectivity holds the most promise. In an election where Trump is the candidate, both sides do it is a victory for Trump and further damages the press.