Preface: This preliminary video is for an overall picture of the President's condition, not for any facts aside from that.
Mr. T on Fox
(via YouTube), 30 minutes, April 26, 2018
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The main serious feature:
"Why
Trump Is Winning and the Press Is Losing," by Jay Rosen,
The New York Review of Books, April 25, 2018. Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York
University. Full text next below.
There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the
American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. For
decades, the Republican coalition has tried to hang together by
hating
on elites who claim to know things, like: “What is art?” Or:
“What should college students be taught?” Or: “What counts as news?”
The
media wing
of this history extends back to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in
1964. It passes through
Spiro
Agnew’s speeches for Richard Nixon in 1969, and winds forward
to our own time through William Rusher’s 1988 book,
The Coming
Battle for the Media, the growth of conservative talk radio in
the 1990s, and the spectacular success of the Fox News Channel,
which found a lucrative business model in resentment news, culture
war, and the battle cry of liberal bias.
Donald Trump is both the apotheosis of this history and its
accelerant. He has advanced the proposition dramatically, from undue
influence—Agnew’s claim—to something closer to treason, in which
journalists have become “enemies of the people.” Instead of
criticizing “the Media” for unfair treatment, as Agnew did, Trump
whips up hatred of it. Some of his most demagogic moments have been
attacks on the press, often by singling out reporters and camera
crews for abuse during rallies with an atmosphere of menace.
Nixon seethed about the press in private. Trump seethes in public, a
very different act. But his transformation of the right-wing media
complaint goes beyond these lurid performances. It starts at the
top, with the president’s almost daily attacks on “fake news,” and
his description of leading institutions—
The New York Times,
The
Washington Post, CNN, NBC—as failing and corrupt. Contempt
thus has two places to settle.
At the bottom of the pyramid is an army of online trolls and
alt-right activists who shout down stories critical of the president
and project hatred at the journalists who report them. Between the
president at the top and the base at the bottom are the mediating
institutions:
Breitbart,
Drudge Report,
The
Daily Caller, Rush Limbaugh, and, especially, Fox News.
The campaign operates differently on the three major sections of a
Trumpified electorate. For core supporters, media hate helps frame
the president as a fighter for them. “I will put these people down
for you” was one of the most attractive promises Trump made during
the campaign. He has delivered on that pledge. They, in turn,
deliver for him by categorically rejecting news reports that are
critical of the president, in the belief that journalists are simply
trying to bring their guy down.
On his committed opponents, the president’s political style works by
inviting ridicule and attack. Their part in the script is simply to
keep the culture war going through reflexive responses to the
awfulness of the Trump phenomenon. The anger, despair, and disbelief
that Trump inspires in his most public doubters is felt as
confirmation, and consumed as entertainment by his most committed
supporters—and his trolls. Notice how if Trump’s opponents defend
the reporting of an institution like
The New York Times (or
simply make reference to it as revealed fact), that supports his
campaign to discredit the press as a merely ideological institution.
Then there’s the third group: Americans who are neither committed
supporters nor determined critics of Donald Trump. On them, the
campaign to discredit the press works by generating noise and
confusion, raising what economists call
“search
costs” for good information. If the neither-nors give up and
are driven from the attention field, that is a win for the president
as the polarizer-in-chief.
So that’s my short course in how the campaign to discredit the
American press operates. Let me turn to what is at risk because of
it. I have a list of items, some of which belong in an “already
happened” category.
There is a risk that one third of the electorate will be isolated in
an information loop of its own, where Trump becomes the major source
of information about Trump, because independent sources are rejected
on principle. That has already happened. An authoritarian system is
up and running for a portion of the polity. Another way to say this
is that before journalists log on in the morning, one third of their
potential public is already gone.
There is a risk that Republican elites will fail to push back
against Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions, including the
press, even though these same elites start their day by reading
The
New York Times and
The Washington Post. This, too, has
already happened. “I think that a continual tearing down of
institutions in order to inspire your base and keep yourself
protected with your base, to me, is damaging to our nation,” said
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, at a breakfast
sponsored by
The Christian Science Monitor, April 18. He
added: “I do not think tearing down the media is good for our
nation.” That statements like these from Republican leaders are
vanishingly rare is a striking feature of the political scene, and
an enabling condition for the campaign to discredit the press.
Corker, of course, is retiring.
There is a risk that journalists could do their job brilliantly, and
it won’t really matter, because Trump supporters categorically
reject it, Trump opponents already believed it, and the neither-nors
aren’t paying close enough attention. In a different way, there is a
risk that journalists could succeed at the production of great
journalism and fail at its distribution, because the platforms
created by the tech industry have so overtaken the task of
organizing public attention.
There is an obvious risk that the press will lose touch with the
country, fall out of contact with American culture. Newsroom
diversity is supposed to prevent that, but the diversity project has
itself been undermined by a longer and deeper project in mainstream
journalism, which I have called the
View
from Nowhere, by which I mean the attempt to acquire authority
by constructing an artificial impartiality, by “performing
objectivity.”
At the same time, the press is at risk of losing its institutional
footing. For instance, in the hands of Sean Spicer and Sarah
Huckabee Sanders, the White House briefing has gone to ruin. It was
always frustrating—now it’s useless, even counterproductive.
Many floors below the surface of journalism there are bedrock
attitudes that make the practice possible—and thinkable. For
example: the belief in informed consent, or that information sources
independent of the state are needed to monitor the state. There is a
risk of erosion there. When the president of the United States
forcefully rejects the premise of a common world of fact, and
behaves like there is no such thing, any practice resting on that
premise is in political trouble. This has happened to journalism. No
one knows what to do about it.
There is a risk that established forms of journalism will be unable
to handle the strain that Trump’s behavior places upon them. For
example, the practice we came to call fact-checking has had zero
effect in preventing the president from
repeating
falsehoods. There is a risk that the press will hang onto
these forms well past their sell-by date because it’s what they
know. They want things to be normal. For instance, access to
confusion and disinformation serves no editorial goal, but “access
journalism” is alive and well in White House reporting.
It used to be the case that when the American presidency went
abroad, the American press came with it. There would be a joint news
conference with the foreign head of state. Often, this would be the
only time the host country’s press corps got to question their
leader. In these moments, the American government and the American
press worked together to show the strongmen of the world what a real
democracy was like. All that is now at risk. What was once
described—yes, with some hyperbole—as a beacon to the rest of the
world is flickering. When Donald Trump met the president of China in
November of 2017,
there
was no joint press conference. The Chinese didn’t want it. The
State Department didn’t object.
I will conclude with something Steve Bannon put to the author
Michael Lewis earlier this year. “The Democrats don’t matter,”
Bannon
said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal
with them is to flood the zone with shit.” To this kind of
provocation, Marty Baron, editor of
The Washington Post, has
a succinct reply: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” I think our top
journalists are correct that if they become the political opposition
to Trump, they will lose. And yet, they have to go to war against a
political style in which power gets to write its own story.
There is a risk that they will fail to make this distinction. In my
role as a critic, I have been trying to alert them to that danger. I
cannot say it’s working.
* * *
Adapted from an address to the
Center
for Media at Risk launch symposium, University of
Pennsylvania, April 21, 2018.
April 25, 2018, 7:00 am
* * *
Reminder: Me I just read. But the best televised news
authority at this point is proven to be PBS. Those who watch
Fox got
fewer answers to simple questions correct than those with at least a high
school education who watch no news at all.
LS
love to you and your family,
Larry
P.S. In my travels on Quora I certainly have seen many destructive trolls like those
mentioned by Professor Rosen. They are a rather common topic--a bit too common.
