You simply can’t make this up. The mood was grim on Wednesday’s Hardball as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Mother Jones editor David Corn, and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wallowed in how President-elect Donald Trump created a landscape where the news media is so distrusted that people might soon not trust movie times in newspapers. Fretting at the idea that people “are living in entirely different universes in terms of the facts they're exposed to” (read: conservatives), the three predicted that outlets like the Associated Press and New York Times will no longer trusted and thus Trump could run roughshod without any consequences. Bruni initially made a point about Trump disregarding the media whenever an investigative story critical of him was published, but it was Matthews that seized on Bruni’s argument to wonder: Well, what are people to make? They pick up The Times and they read a football score from last weekend. 29-20, the Redskins lost. Do they think that's credible? And the movie starts at 7:00 tomorrow night. Do they believe that? At what point — and I’ll go to you, David — at one point are people being told, dog trained, if you will, not to believe facts? Not opinion, facts. Can you say fallacy, Chris? The MSNBC host’s extension record-low trust in the media to sports scores and movie times only underscored the pathetic overreaction that media types have employed since the election. With each Trump comment about the press, the outrage meter is always set to 11, no matter how serious it may/may not be. Moving along, Corn responded to Matthews by crying foul over there being a “campaign” by those opposing the work of publications like Mother Jones to instead construct “alternative realities” on climate change and gun control. “Look, well, we know that there are myriad conflicts of interest that have not been resolved that Mother Jones, The New York Times, Washington Post have reported on and he keeps ducking this issue...He doesn't get to the details. He only talks in headlines and slogans that are red meat for his conservative base,” Corn later added. Continuing down the path to painting a future United States ruled under authoritarianism, Bruni ruled that “[w]e're in really scary territory here in a lot of ways” because “t's not just that people are now having arguments about what is and isn't a fact.” Rather, Bruni ruled that: We have Americans who are living in entirely different universes in terms of the facts they're exposed to. We’ve all so siloed ourselves and segmented ourselves and live in these curated news environments. So, I worry like when we come out with some of the kinds of important stories that you mentioned before. There will be big stories like that, big investigative scoops during the Trump administration. Will there be an enormous group of Americans who don't even see that or see it in an entirely different way because they're living in such a particular curated news environment that’s curated to be an echochamber of their partisan beliefs? In another dosage of eyebrow-raising irony, Matthews put forth the idea that newspapers and wire services shutting down bureaus would lead to stringers with unknown sets of biases and damage the news industry. “Well, when you start relying on derivative news, you don't know whether that guy or woman is really a straight reporter. There could be all kinds of politics going on in their heads. But that's seeping back no into domestic coverage because if you suspect the motivation of even a straight AP reporter, UPI — not UPI — AP, Reuters, French Agency Presse, you’re — you don't know what facts are,” wondered Matthews. Corn fit in the last set of comments before commercial break by resurrecting how, decades ago, former Senator Jesse Helms “ran a campaign against Dan Rather.” The Mother Jones Washington bureau chief cited this as an example of how “the right...has attacked what they call the mainstream media for being liberal and out of touch and opposed to them” for decades. http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb...es-nyt-lefties-bemoan-how-no-one-listens-them
I would loved to have been on that panel and asked them a bunch a questions about their version of facts.
Cracks me up, before they could even agree on the spin Trump started in on the democrats lies about ACA. Now his tweets about the lies are the news. And all he ever does is say what everybody is thinking.