Nah nah, nah nah, nah nah. It took a few days after the election for the letters to start rolling in, but roll they did.
Maybe they were delayed by the post-election, kinder, gentler Donald Trump, appearing serious and thoughtful and possibly absorbing the enormity of not just what he had done, but what he must do.
Every American should hope that’s real. Being a longtime observer of human nature, I have my doubts, but we all can hope.
But the letters, ah, the letters. The in-your-face, name-calling, victory dance of the suddenly no longer dispossessed. Some of them appeared to be possessed.
Damned mainstream media. Liberal press. Liars and distorters. Those were the nice descriptions. One of the not-so-nice ones described the press as “living in the anal cavities of those hell-bent on the destruction of the last best hope for a free people, the USA.”
I wondered what that smell was!
It was quite the superior dance. It was a ways short of the graciousness shown by President Barack Obama in the days after the election when he met with President-elect Trump. The current White House occupant went out of his way to be nice to the future one, and exhorted the nation “to root for the success” of our new president.
Compare that with the “I hope he fails” diatribe from Rush Limbaugh just ahead of Obama’s 2009 inauguration.
During campaigns, we all understand the political reality of painting your own candidacy with a rose brush while decrying all that is wrong with the other guy. Donald Trump must have used the word “disaster” a million times in describing his dark view of America. I never quite got that, given that unemployment is at a 12-year low, interest rates are at even longer-term low and the stock market has climbed more or less straight up to record heights since 2009.
Disastahs!
But that’s not the main point here. Trump supporters and non-supporters all should be rooting for the success of the so-called mainstream media and not delude themselves into thinking someone or something else can do its job.
I’m rooting for it to do its job, but probably not like you think. The large national newspapers in our country – New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, etc. – are the only ones with large enough newsrooms and a sufficient number of journalists to cover the national government in depth. These newspapers are failing in at least two significant ways – they are failing financially and they have been failing to do an objective job of covering government.
As much as the right wants to connect the two, to say their financial failure happened because of left-leaning reporting, it ain’t so. Deeper market and cultural forces are to blame – the internet, specifically the loss of classified advertising to free on-line sites, the rise of social media as an inadequate substitute for real reporting, the downward spiral of the average American attention span and lack of civic engagement are all to blame.
Facebook often functions as an enabler of this shallowness and unaccountable rumor-mongering, not as a source of real journalism. Ditto for Twitter and others that put out false stories such as the Pope Francis “endorsement” of Trump, or the pending indictment of Hillary Clinton. There is plenty of garbage from the left, too.
Little of this content is edited or challenged. It’s the Wild West, where anyone can manufacture his own version of truth and fling it into cyberspace, unchecked.
People who say they get their “news” from only those kinds of sources aren’t getting news at all. They are getting unvetted propaganda. The best part is, they can search until they find “news” that agrees with what they already believe. That’s called confirmation bias and it’s rampant on both sides.
Donald Trump was expert in demonizing the “mainstream media,” among other segments of America. He roped press members off literally into a pen at his rallies, called them “scum” and “corrupt,” then pointed to the pen and exhorted his frenzied disciples to jeer and scream at them.
After that, he expected objective coverage? Of course not, but he got what he wanted – a villain, which is a main plank of his us-versus-them schtick.
Here’s a hard truth for “media”-hating right. The American press will be the last thing between the citizenry and a dictator. Wish for it to fail, hoot at those in the pen, hurl bottles and insults at your peril. If it fails, eventually America will, too. That’s why the framers protected freedom of the press in the First Amendment. Listen closely when a politician talks about “amending” it, as Trump has proposed.
I want Donald Trump to succeed because I want America to succeed. I don’t want him to succeed in dismantling the Constitution and the mechanisms enshrined there by geniuses who had just shaken off a dictator. Those guys still had the bruises. They knew.
A vast majority of newspapers are not gigantic metropolitan papers. The rest are out there covering school boards, reporting about a highly paid superintendent who was using district credit cards like a personal piggybank. We have professional journalists doing that work for your benefit, going to city halls and county courthouses to see how they’re spending your money.
We’re also covering your sports teams, shooting pictures of Christmas parades, reporting on Eagle Scout projects and service club fundraisers, telling you who was born and who died.
Do you think someone on Twitter is going to do that? Or some anonymous website?
We are not cheerleaders. We are not villains. Our larger brethren ought to do a better job of objectively reporting the news. Maybe they’ll note the tar-and-feathers attitude in the hinterlands and shape up. I hope so.
Killing the messenger is a time-honored technique of politicians, crazy bosses and dictators. Better a flawed messenger than none at all.
