Trump and the mainstream media wage war
By Tom Quiner
Here’s how CNN’s Julian Selizer reacted to President Trump’s press conference yesterday:
“The style that we saw on display at this news conference highlighted many parts of President Trump that are causing deep concern…”
The New York Times’ David Brooks was even more sour:
“I still have trouble seeing how the Trump administration survives a full term. Judging by his Thursday press conference, President Trump’s mental state is like a train that long ago left freewheeling and iconoclastic, has raced through indulgent, chaotic and unnerving, and is now careening past unhinged, unmoored and unglued.”
By way of contrast, the Washington Post’s, Chris Cillizza, gets it. He gets Trump’s tactic:
“…Trump understands something very important: For his supporters, the media represent everything they dislike about American society. The media is composed, to their mind, of Ivy-League-educated coastal elites who look down their noses at the average person, dismissing them and their views as stupid and ill-informed. For people who feel like their voices weren’t and aren’t heard in politics — or culture more broadly — the media is the perfect scapegoat.
The media were the ones who told you Obamacare was great. The media were the ones who didn’t report that Hillary Clinton got all the debate questions in advance. The media were the ones who said I couldn’t win. The media is lying to you now because they don’t want you to know all the good things I am doing.
And the truth is that Trump’s broadside against the terrible dishonesty of the media will leave lots of heads nodding around the country.”
Look at the graph above. You can see the hit the mainstream media (MSM) has taken as they made the choice to morph journalism into advocacy.
Do you remember when Katie Couric became anchor and managing editor of CBS News in 2006? Their new slogan became: “we’ll go beyond the news; we’ll tell you what it means.” Except that the public didn’t need anyone to tell them what it means. We just wanted plain, ol’ news.
The way the elites in the MSM determine meaning is far different from how working class America sees it; which explains the graph above; which explains why Donald Trump is president.
CNN and their elite allies in the MSM are out to get Trump. As long as they continue to pursue a path of advocacy rather than reporting, the chart above is going to continue on its relentless downward arc.