DeaconSig
Well-known member
The media has abdicated its role in responsible fact checking for a long time. The reason they have little credibility right now is because they are being hypocritical. They are exactly right to malign Trump, but their voice would be heard much louder if they had acted responsibly for the past decade and a half. That is my take away. The media is going crazy because half the country has tuned them out and is listening to Trump's lies. A large part of the reason why people aren't listening to the mass media is because the mass media hasn't been in the truth business for a long time. They have been in the opinion business. Now they are trying to sell themselves as truth, when half the country sees them as opinion. That is a difficult transition.
I understand you believe this, but it is just not true.
Repeat after me- THERE IS NO MEDIA. There is no monolithic organization that directs coverage of the news. There are a variety of different sources of media, all which are, sadly enough, competing against each other for the eyes and ears of the populace. The NYT, WSJ, WaPO, ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, BBC and Fox are not driven by some sort of set of grand puppeteers.
I will buy that the fact media, especially tv media, has become a 24-hour ratings thing is absolutely horrible for the public. It led to the dearth of journalism and instead relied on having 2 people with opposing viewpoints battle it out, without any real sense of what the actual facts are. But the White House press corps for the print media is just as solid now as it has ever been. The people who get that designation for the legit outlets (as opposed to the Breitbarts, White Nationalist Daily, and various bloggers that the Trump Adminstration had deigned to include), are generally some of the best in the world at their jobs.
The failure of news outlets has not been the failure to act responsibly. The reporters covering the White House reported fairly on issues ranging from the decision to go to war in Iraq, to the sausage-making that lead to the enactment of the ACA and the fall-out afterwards, to covering things that President (or then-candidate) Trump said. The failure has been that the creation of FoxNews (and the response of outlets like HuffPo, MSNBC, and the like) has made it ok to be slanted, instead of reporting news. That made it easier for most people to get comfortable with only getting news from sources they agree with. And that led to what we have now, where if President Trump acts like a jackass to the media, conservative outlets don't cover it in a meaningful way.