Same As It Ever Was
Same As It Ever Was
Legacy (of Shame) Media Learning Nothing from Trump Victory
There’s being wrong, there’s being very wrong, and there is being willfully and intentionally and delusionally wrong.
The old mainstream media just proved to the world they belong in that third category.
But will it change anything? Will the broadcast networks and the few remaining newspapers and NPR and MSNBC and the rest of the usual suspects take a look at their coverage, their internal culture that allows them to be so self-righteously wrong all the the time, the fact that, no matter hard they tried over the past nine years, they couldn’t quite politically kill off Donald Trump and have a bit of a re-think?
Nope, it appears not.
Exhibit one – this otherworldly multi-screed from the folks who populate the New York Times opinion desk.
NY Times opinion writers give their opinions on the incoming Trump administration. Watch and be in awe.
No further comment needed. – Well, maybe just one.
How each and every one of them is not shuffling their slippers down a lime green hallway every morning to pick their meds from the nurse is truly baffling.
Calls for the Resistance 2.0 grow, ,but fact checkers – who will very shortly be wholly dependent on people like Bill Gates for funding as the government money that has flowed to them through various university and non-governmental organizational cutouts will soon stop - are still not understanding opinions expressed by people they do not like, marginalizing that very resistance.
For example, PolitiFact angrily said “20 million Democratic votes did not disappear” between the 2020 and 2024 elections.
They based their denial oddly not on the actual numbers - it seems there will be probably only about 10 million fewer votes cast this time compared to last – but on only statements of people like a woke wonk form Common Cause and Jen Easterly, the person in charge of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. You know, the person who has been the bellybutton of the censorship beast for the past five years.
Well, there goes any hope for a new respect for objectivity. When I worked for an actual newspaper, when a source lied to you you cut them off and never believed them again. It appears PolitiFact has no such compunctions.
Anyway, since Easterly said the election was absolutely secure, no votes “disappeared” and that turnouts fluctuate, which is true, any implication of there being something very particular about this difference is wrong and stupid and crazy.
But the thrust of that particular topic/idea that has been bubbling up in political circles s that 2020 had more votes than usual because the system was rigged/futzed with/wildly compromised/however you want to describe what happened in 2020. It actually quite infuriates me that daring to question 2020 in anyway is verboten: lax security, drop boxes, vote harvesting on a massive scale, very oddly timed vote-count halts, ballots mailed to dead people and voting times changed and new mail-in ballot rules on and on – even putting aside actual fraud, the massive last minute changes to the process are absolutely worthy of scrutiny and mistrust.
The counting of votes became a truly grey are and a lot of nasty things can happen in grey areas. And probably did.
The actual point of the discussion is that Trump will get pretty much the same number of votes this time as he did in 2020, about 74 million. The Democrat side has dropped from 81 to 70 million votes. Was Kamala 12% less popular than Biden or the did the chaos of the last election goose the Democrats numbers? That’s the legitimately debatable issue in this case, but it already being peremptorily dismissed by PolitiFact.
Another tell of the coming four years is the raising of the issue of money. Tax and spend types never ever talk about how much their programs cost – they are only portrayed as creating benefits that are worthwhile and if you disagree you are evil.
But when it’s a program they find distasteful suddenly government money becomes an issue. Case in point, Trump’s plan to return illegal aliens to their home countries.
“Deportations will cost millions!” headlines are now screaming.
In one sense, that’s typical, but in another it is oddly heartening. When the left starts complaining about government spending, when they start using cost as a justification for opposition, you know you have them on the ropes. In other words, if that’s all they got then you know you’ve got them.
Another proof point is today’s piece in Politico about NATO.
Playing on Trump’s well-known antipathy towards the idea of the United States paying such a massive share of NATO’s cost, his opponents are trying to immediately gin up fear that he will try to leave.
No, he will not. Trump is irked not by the existence of NATO but, again, by the share the US pays (and the bureaucracy.)
One supposes that it is theoretically possible, but the story is based on absurd and intentional misreading of Trump’s position on the matter.
A story on how Trump could make the White House clothing optional or how he will dye his hair pink or how Bugs Bunny will be tapped as the next press secretary (the current one does look like a cartoon character, after all) would all have the same legitimacy and import.
So it seems, so far, that the media will not look at itself, it will not change, and will just wrap the bubble they inhabit tighter and tighter until no one can breathe.
That is already happening as well, albeit in a peremptory fashion with stories about how Trump might change staffers and even the very concept of civil service protections for the top, policy-setting layer of the bureaucracy by introducing Schedule F.
The world can expect the following from the media over the next four years: Every person Trump fires will be portrayed as a selfless, uber-competent public service hero and every person he appoints in their place will be portrayed as a slithering grasping unqualified villain.
But why? Theoretical grown-ups work in these places and they should, in theory, have even just a skoosh of self-understanding. And maybe some do, but there is one very big reason the media will not change: money.
One thing the non-endorsements of Kamala Harris by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post showed the world is that their readers demand to be lied to. They demand everything be filtered for them to comfortably digest through their political worldview.
Thousands of subscriptions were cancelled, both papers infuriated their bases, and even the children in the newsrooms were irritated (note – you are a climate change reporter, not the publisher, so either find another job – good luck with that – or shut up, ya’ douchebag.)
The point is that if, for example, the New York Times - which, unlike the other two papers, actually makes money – decided it was going to go back to actual news reporting and (compared to now at least) be a bit more real and more fair, the subscriber base would have a meltdown.
In the past, when papers relied on advertising, rates for which were set by how many people read the paper, playing things pretty much middle-ish was an economic necessity. But with subscribers now literally paying directly for the “services” of the Times and such, any even possibly conceivable threat to having them flee in large numbers and take their $20 bucks a month with them is a scenario that cannot be contemplated.
You got them to read your paper by telling them lies they wanted to hear and now you’re stuck with that.
The legacy media of shame will, therefore, continue.