Thus far, the American news media's ongoing project to remove Donald Trump from American political life, We've Got The Orange Bastard Now!, has been a series of monumental failures. The recently-introduced Version 4.0, Talking On The Telephone With Ukrainians, has proven to be such a dumpster fire that the media began lying about it before the ink was even dry.
CNN, MSNBC (Jason? @KatyTurNBC has never been "better than this.") and the Washington Post all deliberately hacked hundreds of words out of the released material, completely distorting its meaning, just so they could claim that Trump said something that he clearly didn't. Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times even lied through his teeth about an impeachment poll.
At the New York Times, fresh off yet another unsuccessful round of Brett Kavanaugh fan fiction, NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman notices that President Trump has, of late, seriously ratcheted up his anti-media rhetoric.
It's one thing for randos to comment, "You know, Trump's not wrong." These days, lots of people have been saying that as they have with "enemies of the people" and other Trumpisms that are supposed to horrify all right-thinking Americans. It's quite another when an observer as sober-minded and professional as Mollie Hemingway thinks that "corrupt" is a perfectly valid and acceptable way to describe the modern American news media.
Will Mags feel the need to look in a mirror and maybe...you know...reassess? Doubtful.
So what's going on here? Why does the American news media feel the need to destroy the few remaining shreds of its credibility just to get rid of Donald J. Trump? To answer that, we need to understand something basic.
Trump has committed an impeachable offense. Two of them, in fact.
Since both offenses are interrelated, we could justifiably say that Trump's committed only one impeachable offense but for the sake of clarity, we'll say two. And if the American news media still had a modicum of honesty, they'd already know what those two offenses are.
So what's the first one? Easy.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
In the entire history of this country, from the victory at Yorktown through the ratification of the Constitution and on down to the present day, no political conclusion has ever been more definitively and defiantly foregone than that Hillary Clinton was supposed to have succeeded Barack Obama as president of the United States of America.
Even the legal necessity of holding an election at all was incredibly insulting to Her Majesty; Mrs. Clinton should simply have been allowed to move into the White House the day after the Obamas moved out, given her inaugural speech from the Oval Office and immediately gotten down to business. Considering the conduct of her breezily insouciant campaign, insulting half the electorate ("basket of deplorables") and mistaking Michigan and Wisconsin for Canadian provinces, Gam-Gam seems to have felt that she was entitled to be president.
Fast forward to November, 2016.
Most of us are still greatly amused by all those various pictures of Clinton supporters the moment they realized What Had Just Happened. But as far as I'm concerned, if American television and its associated industries and institutions were to last for a thousand years, men will still say Election Night, 2016 was their finest hour.
Schadenfreude has never been even remotely as intense, pure, unalloyed and glorious as it was that amazing night as I watched all those news professionals turn themselves into stammering dolts trying to explain exactly why they had gotten 2016 as wrong as it is possible to get anything and why Hillary Clinton was not going to be the next president of the United States. So not only did Donald Trump deprive Hillary Clinton of her rightful presidency, he made the American news media look and sound like babbling idiots in the process.
Granted, that's not all that hard to do. But that really wasn't Trump's second impeachable offense, at least not all of it.
This was.
Media hostility toward Republicans in general and conservative Republicans in particular is, of course, nothing new. To varying degrees, it's existed for as long as I've followed politics in this country. There have been American journalists who, regardless of their personal politics or personal feelings, have attempted to play it down the middle, at least pretending to respect Republican candidates.
But that tendency is just about dead. These days, the media/conservative relationship is supposed to work like this. During primaries and campaigns, the media will rip the conservative up one side and down the other. Words like "racist" and "homophobe" will be casually bandied about. It's okay for the conservative to strongly object to the media's characterizations as long as that conservative makes it clear that his criticism should in no way be taken as a criticism of the journalistic profession.
Once the conservative is safely defeated and out of the way, he or she must utter the right words and disapprove of the right people (and it doesn't have to be outright hostility; as long as it is clearly communicated, aristocratic scorn is perfectly acceptable. Think of the long-time attitude of Pro-Cons toward pro-lifers or deeply-conservative Christians). If all that is done to the media's satisfaction, Strange New RespectTM is then granted to the conservative.
So along comes Trump who, for all practical purposes, tells the American news media, "Let's cut the crap. You don't like me and you aren't going to cover me with anything remotely resembling fairness or objectivity. I get that because I don't like you and I have no reason whatsoever to respect you or your 'profession.' So you go ahead and do you and I'll let you know when you fail because you will. Often."
There it is. Trump needs to go primarily because he doesn't respect "journalism." Do it badly, sloppily or dishonestly and he'll not hesitate to call you out. And American journalism cannot ever permit itself to be judged by non-professionals. Because if that is ever allowed to happen, American journalists will learn what I learned at the end of 2012.
What happens when your profession becomes irrelevant.
CNN, MSNBC (Jason? @KatyTurNBC has never been "better than this.") and the Washington Post all deliberately hacked hundreds of words out of the released material, completely distorting its meaning, just so they could claim that Trump said something that he clearly didn't. Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times even lied through his teeth about an impeachment poll.
At the New York Times, fresh off yet another unsuccessful round of Brett Kavanaugh fan fiction, NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman notices that President Trump has, of late, seriously ratcheted up his anti-media rhetoric.
It's one thing for randos to comment, "You know, Trump's not wrong." These days, lots of people have been saying that as they have with "enemies of the people" and other Trumpisms that are supposed to horrify all right-thinking Americans. It's quite another when an observer as sober-minded and professional as Mollie Hemingway thinks that "corrupt" is a perfectly valid and acceptable way to describe the modern American news media.
Will Mags feel the need to look in a mirror and maybe...you know...reassess? Doubtful.
So what's going on here? Why does the American news media feel the need to destroy the few remaining shreds of its credibility just to get rid of Donald J. Trump? To answer that, we need to understand something basic.
Trump has committed an impeachable offense. Two of them, in fact.
Since both offenses are interrelated, we could justifiably say that Trump's committed only one impeachable offense but for the sake of clarity, we'll say two. And if the American news media still had a modicum of honesty, they'd already know what those two offenses are.
So what's the first one? Easy.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
In the entire history of this country, from the victory at Yorktown through the ratification of the Constitution and on down to the present day, no political conclusion has ever been more definitively and defiantly foregone than that Hillary Clinton was supposed to have succeeded Barack Obama as president of the United States of America.
Even the legal necessity of holding an election at all was incredibly insulting to Her Majesty; Mrs. Clinton should simply have been allowed to move into the White House the day after the Obamas moved out, given her inaugural speech from the Oval Office and immediately gotten down to business. Considering the conduct of her breezily insouciant campaign, insulting half the electorate ("basket of deplorables") and mistaking Michigan and Wisconsin for Canadian provinces, Gam-Gam seems to have felt that she was entitled to be president.
Fast forward to November, 2016.
Most of us are still greatly amused by all those various pictures of Clinton supporters the moment they realized What Had Just Happened. But as far as I'm concerned, if American television and its associated industries and institutions were to last for a thousand years, men will still say Election Night, 2016 was their finest hour.
Schadenfreude has never been even remotely as intense, pure, unalloyed and glorious as it was that amazing night as I watched all those news professionals turn themselves into stammering dolts trying to explain exactly why they had gotten 2016 as wrong as it is possible to get anything and why Hillary Clinton was not going to be the next president of the United States. So not only did Donald Trump deprive Hillary Clinton of her rightful presidency, he made the American news media look and sound like babbling idiots in the process.
Granted, that's not all that hard to do. But that really wasn't Trump's second impeachable offense, at least not all of it.
This was.
Media hostility toward Republicans in general and conservative Republicans in particular is, of course, nothing new. To varying degrees, it's existed for as long as I've followed politics in this country. There have been American journalists who, regardless of their personal politics or personal feelings, have attempted to play it down the middle, at least pretending to respect Republican candidates.
But that tendency is just about dead. These days, the media/conservative relationship is supposed to work like this. During primaries and campaigns, the media will rip the conservative up one side and down the other. Words like "racist" and "homophobe" will be casually bandied about. It's okay for the conservative to strongly object to the media's characterizations as long as that conservative makes it clear that his criticism should in no way be taken as a criticism of the journalistic profession.
Once the conservative is safely defeated and out of the way, he or she must utter the right words and disapprove of the right people (and it doesn't have to be outright hostility; as long as it is clearly communicated, aristocratic scorn is perfectly acceptable. Think of the long-time attitude of Pro-Cons toward pro-lifers or deeply-conservative Christians). If all that is done to the media's satisfaction, Strange New RespectTM is then granted to the conservative.
So along comes Trump who, for all practical purposes, tells the American news media, "Let's cut the crap. You don't like me and you aren't going to cover me with anything remotely resembling fairness or objectivity. I get that because I don't like you and I have no reason whatsoever to respect you or your 'profession.' So you go ahead and do you and I'll let you know when you fail because you will. Often."
There it is. Trump needs to go primarily because he doesn't respect "journalism." Do it badly, sloppily or dishonestly and he'll not hesitate to call you out. And American journalism cannot ever permit itself to be judged by non-professionals. Because if that is ever allowed to happen, American journalists will learn what I learned at the end of 2012.
What happens when your profession becomes irrelevant.
6 comments:
"Once the conservative is safely defeated and out of the way,"
Ever notice all the mooning over the likes of John McCain by people who were never, ever going to vote for him?
And you might consider his third offense: giving us a roaring economy and low unemployment rates.
I can't tell you how much I missed the old site in the aftermath of the Trump victory!
I don't think the old site could have done it justice. Took me a LONG time to come down from that high.
May I suggest a fourth offense? Trump is a self-made billionaire. He doesn't need any lobbyist money in exchange for political favors. He also doesn't care what people like the movers
& shakers in DC and the media think of him. He's not beholden to anyone.
I think you nailed it, Myrmidon. That's a large part of what's at the bottom of all this. Trump doesn't need ANY of those people and that's intolerable to them. So "crimes" need to be found so that he can be gotten rid of. And if necessary, "crimes" need to be invented out of whole cloth.
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