http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452415/donald-trump-pops-liberal-media-bubble 1.4K 8' President Trump speaks to reporters in Morristown, N.J., September 24, 2017. (Reuters photo: Aaron P. Bernstein) Pop Goes the Liberal Media Bubble by Matthew ContinettiOctober 7, 2017 12:00 AM @continetti Trump drives the mainstream press to abandon the pretense of objectivity. For years, reporters were content to obscure their ideological dogmas and partisan goals behind the pretense of objectivity and detachment. Though the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN practiced combat journalism against conservatives and Republicans, they did so while aspiring to professional standards of facticity and fairness, and applying, every now and then, scrutiny to liberals and Democrats worthy of investigation. Donald Trump changed that, of course. He is so unusual a figure, and his behavior so outlandish, that his rise precipitated a crisis in a profession already decimated by the collapse of print circulation and advertising dollars. The forces that brought Trump to power are alien to the experience of the men and women who populate newsrooms, his supporters unlike their colleagues, friends, and neighbors, his agenda anathema to the catechism of social liberalism, his career and business empire complex and murky and sensational. Little surprise that journalists reacted to his election with a combination of panic, fear, disgust, fascination, exhilaration, and the self-affirming belief that they remain the last line of defense against an emerging American autocracy. Who has time for dispassionate analysis, for methodical research and reporting, when the president’s very being is an assault on one’s conception of self, when nothing less than the future of the country is at stake? Especially when the depletion of veteran editors, the relative youth and inexperience of political and congressional reporters, and the proliferation of social media, with its hot takes and quips, its groupthink and instant gratification, makes the transition from inquiry to indignation all too easy. There is still excellent journalism. I would point, for starters, to the work on charter flights that led to the resignation of Tom Price. But the overall tone of coverage of this president and his administration is somewhere between the hysterical and the lunatic. Journalists are trapped in a condition of perpetual outrage, seizing on every rumor of discontent and disagreement, reflexively denouncing Trump’s every utterance and action, unable to distinguish between genuinely unusual behavior (the firing of Comey, the tenure of Anthony Scaramucci, the “fine people on both sides” quip after Charlottesville) and the elements of Trump’s personality and program that voters have already, so to speak, “priced in.” Supposedly authoritative news organizations have in one case taken up bizarre mottoes, like “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and in another acted passive-aggressively by filing Trump stories under “entertainment,” only to re-categorize the material as news with the disclaimer (since dropped) that Trump is “a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and birther.” The mode of knee-jerk disgust not only prevents the mainstream media from distinguishing between the genuinely interesting stories and the false, partisan, and hackwork ones. It also has had the effect of further marginalizing print and broadcast journalists from middle America. The other day, for example, Bob Schieffer observed on Face the Nation that one in five journalists live in New York, D.C., or Los Angeles. The news is manufactured by residents of the liberal bubble, where conservatives are few and far between (and certainly do not sound like Sarah Palin), jobs are plenty, education is high, and the benefits of globalization manifest in cheap prices, exotic restaurants, and a reserve labor force of cleaners, contractors, and home-care specialists. Can’t say I was shocked when Schieffer’s finding passed barely noticed, the consciences of the press untroubled by the fact that their experiences and backgrounds are so unlike the majority of the public whose interest they presume to uphold. Nor was I stunned when a major report from the Pew Research Center found that “about six-in-ten news stories about Trump’s first 60 days (62 percent) carried an overall negative assessment of his words and actions. That is about three times more negative than for Obama (20 percent) and roughly twice that of Bush and Clinton (28 percent each).” This, at a time when the stock market is at record highs, the economy is at full employment, and Americans are upbeat about the recovery. The president’s inability to register majority approval in opinion polls may be unprecedented, but so is the amount of negative coverage he has received. Perhaps there’s a connection. Trump does not change, but his critics in the media have. Their feelings of revulsion toward him have deepened. Their eagerness to oppose him has become more acute. The scope of their vision has constricted to include only Trump: what he says, tweets, and does. The context in which he operates is invisible to them. When he raises the question of what the ultimate outcome of the removal of Confederate statues might be, the critics slag him as a racist, but do not dwell for long on polling that shows him to be in the center of public opinion. When he voices what many have felt about the politicization of the NFL and the attack on the flag and national anthem, the critics say he is being divisive and insensitive. But why is it always Trump who is being divisive, and not those who say the flag and anthem are symbols of white supremacy, and who raise fists in the black-power salute? Trump does not change, but his critics in the media have. Their feelings of revulsion toward him have deepened. Their eagerness to oppose him has become more acute. Ever since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, I have looked up from my desk to find San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz on CNN attacking the White House response. Her selection of hats and T-shirts was far more varied than her anti-Trump message. Her verbal assaults mounted to the point where she accused him of presiding over “something close to a genocide.” Yet when Trump defended himself and FEMA on Twitter the next morning, it was he, not she, who was “lashing out.” The desire on the part of Trump’s critics for Maria to become his “Katrina moment” is palpable. It has led reporters to disregard their own previous work on the dismal condition of Puerto Rico’s governance, finances, infrastructure, education, and public-health systems, not to mention the fact that it is more than a thousand miles away from the mainland. It has inspired articles suggesting that an influx of Puerto Ricans to Florida “could well prove to be a boon to Democrats.” (They said the same thing before 2016.) It spurred Paul Krugman to circulate the fake news that cholera had appeared on the island. Most ridiculous was the Bloomberg story, “Trump’s Puerto Rico Feud May Cause Lasting Damage to the GOP,” whose authoritative and objective sources included an academic, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and John Brennan. As I watched Trump visit the island Tuesday, I saw crowds that looked pleased to see him, eager for his help, and even chuckling at his irreverence. Yet the commentary from D.C.- and New York-based pundits, uniformly hostile to the president, was that his appearance was an unmitigated, embarrassing, insulting disaster. Whom to believe, the folks who thought Hillary had it in the bag, or my own lying eyes? “Media-driven myths are tales of doubtful authenticity, false or improbable claims masquerading as factual,” writes W. Joseph Campbell in Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths of American Journalism. “In a way, they are the junk food of journalism—alluring and delicious, perhaps, but not especially wholesome or nourishing.” If that is the case, then since Trump’s inauguration the media have been bingeing on Frito Lays. Among Campbell’s subjects is the “flawed and exaggerated” coverage of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. “On crucial details, journalists erred badly and got it wrong.” Perish the thought that journalists might be getting some of the crucial details of the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria wrong, as well. By the time of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the inevitable calls for gun control in its aftermath, I was once again reminded that much of what I read or watch contains no information whatsoever. “It has become impossible to report just ‘facts’ about gun violence,” tweeted a reporter for NBC, without any acknowledgment that if he is tired of “facts” he might have chosen the wrong profession. Then again, maybe he’s in exactly the right place. MORE ARTICLESHOME Pondering the Question of Confederate Honor Democrats Send the Country Further Down a Path of Division in Virginia The Next Lost Cause Confronting the Terror Threat On Tax Reform, Republicans are Defining Victory Down What passes for news today is speculation and advocacy, wishful thinking and self-fashioning, mindless jabber and affirmations of virtue, removed from objective reality and common sense. The content is intended not for the public but for other media. In a recent interview with Peter J. Boyer about her institution’s study of press coverage of Trump, Amy Mitchell said, “One of the things that was interesting to see was that, while the topic of the news media was not a huge percentage of overall coverage, journalists were both the second most common source type as well as the second most common ‘trigger’ of the stories.” The CNN anchors aren’t talking to you. They are talking to one another. The conversations that journalists in New York and D.C. and L.A. trigger among themselves have very little to do with the conversations between most people, in most places, at most times. The conversations are self-referential, self-sustaining, self-validating, and selfishly concern one topic: the president of the United States. That may be why his critics in the press are so fixated on his tweets. Twitter is his way of talking back. It’s how he pops the liberal media bubble. — Matthew Continetti is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, where this column first appeared. © 2017 All rights reserved TODAY IN by Michael Brendan Dougherty
Former NPR CEO opens up about liberal media bias By Ken Stern October 21, 2017 | 9:53am | Updated AP Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be. This may seem like an unusual admission from someone who once ran NPR, but it is borne of recent experience. Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike. I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got. A flood of goodwill was discovered at the Urbana conference.AP At Urbana, I met dozens of people who were dedicating their lives to the mission, spreading the good news of Jesus, of course, but doing so through a life of charity and compassion for others: staffing remote hospitals, building homes for the homeless and, in one case, flying a “powered parachute” over miles of uninhabited jungle in the western Congo to bring a little bit of entertainment, education and relief to some of the remotest villages you could imagine. It was all inspiring — and a little foolhardy, if you ask me about the safety of a powered parachute — but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.” Early this year, I drove west from Houston to Gonzales, Texas, to try my hand at pig hunting. It was my first time with a gun, and the noticeably concerned owner of the ranch at first banished me to a solitary spot on the grounds. Here, he said, the pigs would come to me and I could not pose a danger to anyone else. It was a nice spot indeed but did not make for much of a story, so I wandered off into the woods, hopefully protected by my Day-Glo hunting vest. NY Post/Mike Guillen I eventually joined up with a family from Georgia. The group included the grandfather, Paps, and the father, CJ, but it was young Isaac, all of 8 years old, who took on the task of tutoring me in the ways of the hunt. He did a fine job, but we encountered few pigs (and killed none) in our morning walkabout. In the afternoon, with the Georgians heading home, I linked up with a group of friends from Houston who belied the demographic stereotyping of the hunt; collectively we were the equivalent of a bad bar joke: a Hispanic ex-soldier, a young black family man, a Serbian immigrant and a Jew from DC. None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times. In truth, the only one who was even modestly angry was me, and that only had to do with my terrible ineptness as a hunter. In the end, though, I did bag a pig, or at least my new friends were willing to award me a kill, so that we could all glory together in the fraternity of the hunt. I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind. I drank late into the night at the Royal Oaks Bar in Youngstown and met workers who had been out of the mills for almost two decades and had suffered the interlocking plagues of unemployment, opioid addiction and declining health. They mourned the passing of the old days, when factory jobs were plentiful, lucrative and honored and lamented the destruction and decay of their communities, their livelihoods and their families. To a man (and sometimes a woman), they looked at media and saw stories that did not reflect the world that they knew or the fears that they had. Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides. Take, for instance, the issue of legitimate defensive gun use (DGU), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time — 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day, according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families. NY Post/Mike Guillen At one point during my research, I discovered a video of a would-be robber entering a Houston smoke shop, his purpose conveyed by the pistol that he leveled at the store clerk. But the robber was not the only armed person in the store. The security cameras show Raleigh, the store clerk, walking out from behind the counter, calmly raising his own gun and firing an accurate stream of bullets at the hapless robber. The wounded robber stumbles out, falls over the curb and eventually ends up under arrest. It is not just defensive gun use that makes the video remarkable — it is Raleigh himself, who evidences such a nonchalance that he never bothers to put down the cigarette that he is smoking. At the end, Raleigh, having protected his store, enthuses, “Castle Doctrine, baby” — citing a law that allows a person to use force to defend a legally occupied place. It is an amazing story, though far from unique, but you simply won’t find many like it in mainstream media (I found it on Reddit). It’s not that media is suppressing stories intentionally. It’s that these stories don’t reflect their interests and beliefs. It’s why my new friends in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pikeville, Ky., see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias. The mainstream media is constantly under attack by the president. They are “frankly disgusting,” “tremendously dishonest,” “failing,” “they make up the stories” and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author “fake news.” And that is just a random Wednesday’s worth of words from Donald Trump. Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combating, our growing partisan divide. Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well. None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America. You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls. I did that, and loved it, though I regret waiting until well after I left NPR to do so. I am skeptical that many will do so, since the current situation in an odd way works for Trump, who gets to rile his base, and for the media, which has grown an audience on the back of Washington dysfunction. In the end, they are both short-term winners. It is the public that is the long-term loser. Ken Stern is the president of Palisades Media Ventures and the former CEO of National Public Radio. His book “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right” (Harper) is out Tuesday. Facebook Twitter Facebook Messenger WhatsApp Email READ NEXT SPONSORED STORIES 57 awesomely beautiful cat pictures to crack you upViral Kittens Start Your Future Today With Kellogg'sExecutiveDevelopmentProgramKellogg's Executive Development Program , Gets Knocked Out…Google Play © 2017 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights ReservedTerms of Use | Privacy | Sitemap
I have learned a new word from these articles: "facticity". I'll add it to my list of other words that are being used more often now that Donald J. Trump is our President; words such as "Truthiness". Even if Trumps Presidency turns out to be a disastrous failure he can point to the revival of seldom used words as an accomplishment. It is looking more and more like that may be his only positive accomplishment. http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4567-rethinking-facticity.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
The Liberal MSM is disgusting in addition to being out of touch (purposely ) . MSM are nothing but a bunch of limousine liberals who are more concerned with making brownie points with the liberal elitist politicians and rubbing elbows with Hollywood. PS: Notice the Lunatic above deflect as usual.
Hilarious: REAL REASON Democrats Are So DERANGED These Days http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/hilarious-real-reason-democrats-deranged-days