I Miss Journalism

I miss journalism. Decades ago, national political reporting seemed at least fairly objective. Not anymore.

Understandably, Americans’ trust in media has reached an all-time low. Public distrust isn’t limited to the president and his supporters, either. Fully two-thirds of Americans believe the mainstream media publishes and broadcasts fake news. Good journalism may still be around, but it’s seldom found on the national “news” pages and broadcasts where left-wing opinions, advocacy, unfounded accusations, speculations and outright propaganda aren’t only excused, they’re encouraged.

Most Americans, especially those living outside the heavily-liberal coastal strips, large cities and college towns would prefer straightforward reporting. But, national media typically presents and/or misrepresents the administration and anything President Donald Trump says or does in the worst possible light. Media’s relentless, hysterically-biased coverage tends to overshadow, even crowd out genuine news. Left-wing consumers who accept anything negative, real or imagined, and agree with biased mainstream media presentations appear to welcome the decline of more traditional, objective news. But a majority of American consumers have become skeptical of almost everything they see or read, and many have tuned out political media entirely.

Once-respected media organizations and national journalists are making mistakes that wouldn’t have been tolerated six or even two decades ago. And corrections are made grudgingly, if at all, almost always without consequences for the offenders.

Ironically, not only does widespread, unambiguous media bias damage their brands, diminish their markets and revenues, but media displays of mediocrity and arrogance actually benefit the primary target of their vitriol, President Trump.

A few are catching on. In a National Journal column entitled “Trump Exploits Gap Between Elite and Public Opinion,” Josh Kraushaar noticed, “The president’s job approval has inched upwards since Charlottesville, and a surprisingly high number of voters agree with his provocative rhetoric.”

Kraushaar: “The reaction after President Trump’s tepid response to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville was swift and severe. One broadcast network devoted its entire nightly newscast to Trump’s chaotic press conference on Tuesday. The next day, The Economist portrayed the president screaming into a bullhorn shaped as a Ku Klux Klan hood on its coverâ€"with other news magazines following suit.”

Amusingly, Kraushaar’s bias remains evident in his use of the pejoratives “provocative,” “tepid” and “chaotic.”
But the polling to which Kraushaar referred suggests that Americans, generally, don’t share the same level of outrage as the people whose opinions are formed by “elite” media. The larger public views progressive attempts to remove statues by mob violence and intimidation as anti-democratic and unusually dumb, even for militant liberals. Nonetheless, their shrill, media-encouraged determination to rewrite American history persists.

America will be affected far more by what Trump’s administration actually does, but most political media have a context-free fixation on parsing, falsely interpreting and slamming Trump’s words rather than on the more important work of objectively reporting his policies and progress.

An Instapundit blogsite poster observed: “Trump benefits from the elite Mass Hysteria Bubble. That’s why he keeps pumping air into it.”

Over-inflated, all bubbles eventually burst.

http://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/2017/10/05/miss-journalism/731566001/