Media Seeks Safe Space
On August 16, Americans witnessed a self-indulgent, pearl-clutching modern parody of Thermopylae’s 300 Spartan warriors — the culmination of the Boston Globe’s “heroic” campaign to enlist 300 or more other newspapers in a coordinated editorial “counterattack” on President Donald Trump’s “aggressions” against “fake news” and his “assaults” on certain national political news outlets as “enemies of the people.”
Walter Kirn tweeted: “Angered by Trump’s charge that it feigns independence while acting as a unified attack machine, the press responds with a coordinated, unified attack on Trump. Smart.”
The Globe’s Marjorie Pritchard told CNN: “We have some big newspapers, but the majority are from smaller markets, all enthusiastic about standing up to Trump’s assault on journalism.” That’s not quite right, though. Read on…
Pritchard and others in the industry appear clueless about how many consumers are genuinely amused by the notion that America’s whiny, self-absorbed, self-adulatory media collusionists are somehow under assault, or how few consider their op-ed collaboration to be anything other than a rearguard action by deserving targets of a president whose opinions of national media millions share.
The NY Post’s Karol Markowicz observed, “Donald Trump didn’t invent deep mistrust of the media, he merely capitalized on it. Over 70 percent of Americans think traditional media outlets report news they know to be fake. News consumers see media…worrying about threats that don’t exist while ignoring actual incidents of violence by people the media doesn’t wish to offend.”
Doubt that? In Charlottesville, VA, recently, hard-left Antifa aggressors threw eggs at federal officers and assaulted a man wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Screaming vulgarities, they aimed fireworks and smoke bombs at police and assaulted an NBC reporter. Charlottesville media covered some of the violence, while national media went MIA. NBC didn’t even report the assault on its employee, but, along with the rest of traditional media, characterized Antifa rioters as “anti-hate demonstrators.”
“Anti-hate” is an extraordinarily odd descriptor for rioters who have committed assault and screamed hatred at law enforcement, peaceful demonstrators with whom they merely disagree, and their own country.
National media haven’t recovered from their colossal 2016 failure to drag an “inevitable” but politically-incompetent, hopelessly-compromised Democrat over the finish line. So they #Resist.
What President Trump has said about them pales in comparison to the constant, ugly allegations national media have hurled at him, starting before he took office. National media’s Democratic Party operatives with bylines, none of whom have been arrested, imprisoned or executed, declared war on Donald Trump and are now only pretending – nonsensically – that presidential criticism somehow threatens them or infringes on their rights.
Consumers are smart. Narcissistic national media foolishly assume that their arrogance, deceptions, bias and – yes – fakery aren’t noticed.
Addressing readers, local newspaper editorials, many/most of which only defended the accuracy and value of local news, effectively disassociated local reporting from national media and tacitly conceded the righteousness of Trump’s complaints about hostile, left-wing, political media adversaries.
Ironically, 300 “coordinated” editorials only reconfirmed things discerning American readers already know.
