HOW IT STARTED:
In his own way, Trump has set us free. Reporters must treat Inauguration Day as a kind of Liberation Day to explore news outside the usual Washington circles. He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines.
Washington reporting has long depended on a transactional relationship between sources and journalists. Journalists groom sources, but sources also groom journalists. There’s nothing inherently unethical about the back-scratching. When a reporter calls an administration source to confirm an embarrassing item, the source may agree to confirm as long as the reporter at the very least agrees to listen sympathetically to the administration’s context. But Trump’s hostile attitude toward the press, his dismissal of CNN for attempting to ask a question at the last conference, and his underhanded ploy at the last conference where he loaded the audience with cheerleaders has muted that mutualism. It’s easy to predict that instead of negotiating with reporters as equals, his administration will advance its agenda by feeding more pliant reporters material the way a trainer rewards circus animals.
—“Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again,” Jack Shafer, the Politico, January 16th, 2017.
How it’s going: The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It.
Nobody ever became a journalist in order to become popular. The broad-stroke portrayals in movies and novels taught us, accurately enough, that journalists tend toward the coarse, vulgar, impudent and nosy. For many years, journalists were generally admired for those attributes in the way that the beef butcher is admired for the scars on his hands.
But thanks, in part, to a fall in status, as well as ever-irrational attacks from politicians like Donald Trump, today’s journalists routinely experience ridicule and harassment at public events like rallies and demonstrations. They’re not precisely pariahs in the new environment, but they’re no longer considered heroes in many places. Journalists don’t deserve any special pity, it should be noted. Police officers, teachers and even doctors often suffer more from the slings and arrows of the mob. But for journalists, the fall has been spectacular and seems never-ending.
Hanging over journalism like a gibbous moon is Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s successful lawsuit against Gawker, financed by the billionaire Peter Thiel, which Tani notes in his Semafor piece. Thiel’s successful action, which forced the site to shutter in 2016, has journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders in worry. In the new climate, law firms have built practices devoted to blocking the publication of tough-minded stories with formal legal warnings.
Perfectly fine publications do exist, and they deserve our support. For instance, there’s the Atlantic, which couldn’t win more National Magazine Awards if the contest were fixed. With stalwart writers like Caitlin Flanagan and Mark Leibovich, the magazine shows it can go full bravado when it wants to. But what’s its excuse for not breaking more icons? Too often, our media seems like it was produced to be consumed by our parents, most of whom are dead.
Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie blames the decline of swagger, in part, to generational forces.
“Millennials and Gen Z have been bred like human veal by their Boomer and Gen X parents who made sure their kids were constantly being surveilled and optimized for success in SATs, sports and entry into the Establishment pipeline,” he says. “Can we be surprised that such a system has produced generations of journalists who endlessly describe anything they disagree with as misinformation and want to control and regulate everything like the room temperature in an after-school enrichment program?”
This attitude has permeated the press, as editors recoil from publishing anything that might cause anyone offense.
—Jack Shafer, the Politico, Monday.
Perhaps, though, there is another reason: Adam Carolla: ‘Every Mainstream Media Narrative … Has Been Wrong.’
“Every mainstream media narrative of the last five years has been wrong, if you really think about it, or skewed or morphed into something,” Carolla said.
“Maybe you start with Russian collusion and the Steele Dossier. ‘There’s a tape. There’s a pee-pee tape,’” he continued of the debunked attacks on President Donald Trump. “And you roll it all the way through COVID or George Floyd or Kyle Rittenhouse .. Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“They’ve been wrong. And not wrong around the edges… there’s always wrong around the edges. They’ve been flat-out f***ing wrong about all of it,” Carolla said.
“If you were to talk to some of the people who reported it, they would be confused,” Dr. Pinsky added of journalists who cannot be shamed for their egregious errors.
I hope those four years were worth it to the DNC-MSM.
