AT LAST, THE 1948 SHOW: “It’s like 1948 all over again for American media,” Media Myth Alert author W. Joseph Campbell writes today:
It looks something like 1948 for mainstream American news media today.
Donald Trump’s stunning victory in yesterday’s presidential election brought reminders of the embarrassment of 1948, when Thomas Dewey, the presumptive favorite for the presidency, was upset by President Harry S. Truman, much to the shock of the American press.
In the weeks and months before yesterday’s election, prominent media analysts predicted Trump was going to lose, and probably decisively, to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Notable among these misplaced predictions was that of Stuart Rothenberg, who wrote on August 9 at the Washington Post’s PowerPost blog:
“Three months from now, with the 2016 presidential election in the rearview mirror, we will look back and agree that the presidential election was over on Aug. 9th.
“Of course,” he added, “it is politically incorrect to say that the die is cast. …
* * * * * * * * *
The media prize for excessive self-confidence has to go to New York magazine: Its election issue cover featured a photograph of an angry Trump, a taunting sneer, “LOSER,” emblazoned across his face. The issue’s publication date was October 31.
The cover today evokes the Chicago Tribune’s memorable and stunningly wrong front-page headline of November 3, 1948, which announced Dewey’s victory over Truman.
This election is also reminiscent of 1948 in another way. I believe that year’s presidential election was the first in which the Democratic nominee explicitly smeared his Republican counterpart as being a Nazi. Beginning with the campaign against Goldwater in ’64, in virtually every election afterwards, the Democratic nominee’s enablers in the DNC-MSM would take up the slack. QED: At NewsBusters today, “Celeb D.L. Hughley Sneers of Trump: ‘My Daddy Survived Jim Crow.’” In 2009, Hughley, then a CNN host, told then Republican party chairman Michael Steele (himself a fellow African-American) that the rank and file Republicans attending the previous year’s GOP Convention “Literally look like Nazi Germany.”
How many times can you cry wolf? How many times you can you pretend America is Berlin in 1939 or the Jim Crow South of 1962? These are questions the MSM should be asking themselves – but judging by their immediate response today, likely never will.
(Classical reference in headline.)
