To state it baldly, there’s no way mainstream media can objectively cover the Trump administration without self-destructing. If you want to skip a lot of reading, go right to the poll.
If you thought the media’s coverage of the race for the White House was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There are simply no rules to cover an administration headed by a man who can’t go five minutes without a lie of some kind. The people around him reinforce those lies even as they simultaneously deny them and double down on them. The man’s chief advisor is a determined propagandist; he comes from an enterprise that has honed misinformation warfare into an art under his leadership.
When conventional journalism comes up against it, it’s not pretty. NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep interviewed the current senior editor of Breitbart News Joel Pollak about clear evidence that the former head of the organization, Steve Bannon (now Trump’s senior White House advisor) promotes White Supremacy, misogyny, and worse. Pollak’s response: denial and counter attack.
INSKEEP: Well, I want to mention, you know, actually putting controversial opinions out there is a perfectly fine idea. We've had David Duke on this program. But we fact check. We try to question. We put in context.
This particular article goes on to make a string of statements. There's a reference of - about President Obama and Kenya. There's also a statement - the Confederacy was not a callous conspiracy to enforce slavery, but a patriotic and idealistic cause. A little bit of research would show that Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, declared the cause was slavery.
I mean, why put these things out there?
POLLAK: I think that we can talk about individual articles out of the tens of thousands at Breitbart. But, you know, NPR is taxpayer-funded and has an entire section of its programming, a regular feature called Code Switch, which from my perspective, is a racist program. I'm looking here at the latest article which aired on NPR calling the election results nostalgia for a whiter America.
So NPR has racial and racist programming...
INSKEEP: Well, let's just...
POLLAK: ...That I am required - I am required to pay for as a taxpayer.
INSKEEP: Well, let me just mention...
emphasis added
Inskeep has to leave it hanging as “we’re running short of time” — but it’s clear he had no way to deal with a direct counterattack like that, plus the added charge that NPR racism is funded by taxpayer money! This is an example of what the press is going to be up against in the days to come.
The problem with trying to deal in objective facts in proper context and reasoned discourse is that the process breaks down when it involves people who don’t give a crap about either, people who have a vested interest in anything but the truth. (It also takes time.)
We’ve been going down this road a long time. It was bad enough in the days of President W.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."[2]
emphasis added
It might have made a difference if the Fourth Estate had treated FOX News as a fringe propaganda machine from the start instead of looking at their ratings and wondering “How do we get some of that?” It might have made a difference if they’d pushed back against Right Wing charges that they were biased against conservatives, instead of bending over backwards to avoid pissing off that portion of their audience. (It was safe to come down on liberals, because they respect the press — or used to.)
It might have made a difference if they’d not lumped news in with entertainment and sports on the big TV networks. It might have made a difference if they’d figured out how to lure viewers with real information instead of whatever grabs them by the gut. It might have made a difference if they’d put a little more effort into getting facts into context instead of chasing ratings and the scandal of the day they’d been spoon-feed.
It might have made a difference if there had been consequences for the people polluting the news stream, instead of rewards. It might have made a difference if there hadn’t been so much media consolidation, with fewer eyes and fewer resources to dig out the stories that need to be told. It might have made a difference if there wasn’t so much money from peddling useful lies as ‘truth’ as a means to power.
It might have made a difference if the media would tell us the stories we need to see, instead of the ones that are ‘safe’ and don’t upset the wrong people. It might have made a difference if the media hadn’t let the Overton window get shoved so far away from reality, the only thing they can see through it is Rupert Murdoch, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, Bannon, et. al. collectively mooning us.
Deviancy has been defined so far downward, we can have a Neo-Nazi sitting in the White House whispering in the ear of the President — and the press hardly dares hint at it. We can have people who should be in jail, an asylum, or at best standing in a park yelling with a bullhorn instead nominated for some of the most critical jobs in government — and the press glosses over who and what they really are.
And then they wonder why they are so detested.
Charles P. Pierce has a number of pungent quotes on how we ended up in Idiot America. Here’s a sampling:
“Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have knocked over and spilled on everything.”
‡
“In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.”
‡
“It’s not that there is less information on television than there once was. In fact, there is so much information that “fact” is now defined as something believed by so many people that television notices their belief, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.”
‡
“Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America—Greil Marcus’s old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America.* A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who’s sold out.”
‡
“Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people’s fervency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what’s contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following the Gut into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.”
emphasis added
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
* Charlatans are now top of the list for jobs in the Trump administration
According to the American Press Institute,
Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It is also the product of these activities.
Journalism can be distinguished from other activities and products by certain identifiable characteristics and practices. These elements not only separate journalism from other forms of communication, they are what make it indispensable to democratic societies. History reveals that the more democratic a society, the more news and information it tends to have.
And what are those elements of journalism? Here’s the first one:
Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
Good decision-making depends on people having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context. Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but in a capacity that is more down to earth.
Anybody seen much of that lately in our mainstream media? Doesn’t seem like it lately. Donald Trump could make Baghdad Bob his press secretary (Sean Hannity says he doesn’t want the job) and it would be about right.