I was going through the Manchester Union-Leader’s historic decision today to pass on the GOP nominee, instead endorsing the Libertarian ticket, and thinking about what it might mean for Democrats and New Hampshire, and coming to the glum conclusion that it will probably draw as much if not more from Hillary than from Trump, given the GOP base’s near lockstep endorsement of power, as opposed to conservatism, as a guiding force.
That focus on power comes, perhaps more than anything, from a media culture in which Republicans have successfully played the media for a quarter of a century into first a posture of defensiveness and then of fluffing candidates of the right while beating down on candidates of the left, all while Republican trust in the press continues to collapse and liberal trust in the press remains at a high level.
Fact is, the Republican Party has shifted so far to a basically fascist message of power for the sake of power that anyone they dislike is in actual danger from the GOP and that they’ll support even unacceptable candidates in the name of power they believe is necessary for their survival. They’re the ones who believe the media is biased against them, because that’s what their politicians and pundits have been telling them for the past 25 years even when they know full well that’s a little white lie; they’re the ones who believe the country is one Democratic administration away from dictatorship. While our leaders keep telling us the Republicans are OK and the media are covering it straight. Well, the Republicans today are not OK. They’re the deviants. They’re the people who are operating on myth and not fact. It’s a pity that it takes Republicans and libertarians like American Enterprise Institute analysts Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann and now even #NeverTrump neoconservative columnist Jennifer Rubin to tell us that.
The right are working the refs. They have been since the early 1990s. Under this working over the media had already degenerated to the point by November 2000 that Charlie Cook, of the Cook Political Report, denounced media coverage in a remark that got far too little coverage then and since in a comment that has stuck with me since the moment he made it at a C-SPAN event; saying “[Gore] paid the price in watching this back and forth, the press coverage. It was like watching a very badly refereed high school basketball game. You know, the bad call and then the make up call.”
And yet Democrats still by and large trust this trainwreck of a press. And why? Because our leaders and pundits don’t tell us to watch out or second-guess like Republican leaders and pundits do with their voters. Our leaders are asleep at the wheel, or too much part of the game. And the result is a presidential election where by any historical standard, our candidate should be beating theirs by record margins, and yet the race is now within the polling margin of error.
It’s up to all of us to make sure Democrats and liberals distrust the media as much as the Republicans. That’s really our only line of defense at this point.
And in the mean time, aside from a few honorable exceptions including the Washington Post and the Dallas Morning News, it appears to be down to foreign media to actually tell us what’s what. Maclean’s newsmagazine of Canada very succinctly boiled down the week of Hillary’s illness to a single column that reminds is this was the week where Donald met or even exceeded his primary and pre-primary insanity, contrary to what you may have thought by reading, watching or listening to almost any US media outlet except the WaPo; the Guardian got hold of the John Doe documents from Wisconsin proving the extent to which local and national Republicans work together to feed the media with a narrative of falsehoods; whilst our so-called liberal media say Trump shouldn’t release his tax returns because people will ask questions, directly parroting Donald Trump jr’s remarks.
Why again do a majority of Democrats and liberals trust the press, yet only 13 percent of Republicans? Never mind why, it looks like it’s going to be on all of us to fix that, and the only way we fix that is by pointing out again and again to Democrats and liberals that the MSM is not to be trusted on political coverage.
