{"id":9688,"date":"2017-01-04T09:01:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T17:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9688"},"modified":"2017-01-04T13:01:58","modified_gmt":"2017-01-04T21:01:58","slug":"the-trump-nail-in-the-media-coffin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-trump-nail-in-the-media-coffin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Town Hall<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
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President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York\/Washington journalists.What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.<\/p>\n

When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.<\/p>\n

The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned.<\/p>\n

That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.<\/p>\n

Soft-spoken liberal hosts on public TV and radio superficially sounded more news-like than their gravelly-voiced populist counterparts on commercial radio and cable news.<\/p>\n

Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.<\/p>\n

Journalists such as Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times and Christiane Amanpour of CNN said that they could not — and should not — be neutral reporters, given their low opinion of Trump.<\/p>\n

When the press is unashamedly slanted, even its benefactors want even more partiality — media heartthrob Barack Obama included.<\/p>\n

In his last press conference as president, Obama attacked pet journalists for reporting on WikiLeaks’ release of John Podesta’s emails, supposedly at the expense of his own legacy and Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments.<\/p>\n

The WikiLeaks trove certainly proved another disaster to the media — but only because it revealed that mainstream journalists conspired with the Clinton campaign.<\/p>\n

CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked possible debate questions to Clinton. One op-ed columnist, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, even asked Clintonites for research to help him attack Trump.<\/p>\n

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Politico’s Glenn Thrush sent a story to the Clinton campaign team to be audited before publication. He begged to keep his collusion quiet and admitted that he had become a “hack” for such journalistic impropriety. Thrush may have been rewarded for his predictable left-wing bias, recently being hired by the New York Times as a White House correspondent.<\/p>\n

Last week, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman grotesquely suggested via Twitter that Trump might welcome another 9\/11-like attack, given that such a human catastrophe supposedly helped win support for George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Recently, another Politico reporter, Julia Ioffe, used Twitter to relay a news story about the possibility that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, would get an office at the White House. In her tweet, Joffe suggested that Trump was either having incestuous relations with his daughter or skirting nepotism laws.<\/p>\n

Politico fired Ioffe — sort of. She had already announced that she was moving from Politico to the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Yet the Atlantic announced that it would not rescind her hire — suggesting that her political bias, despite the accompanying unprofessionalism and uncouthness, could almost be interpreted as a plus.<\/p>\n

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In today’s media, all of this progressive distortion serves as an insurance policy for lapses of personal integrity like those of Thrush and Joffe.<\/p>\n

MSNBC anchor Brian Williams sermonized about the so-called “fake news” epidemic. Williams failed to remind us that he was removed as NBC’s evening news anchor for serving up all sorts of fake details about his supposedly brave trips abroad in search of edgy news stories.<\/p>\n

After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the co-hosts of the show “CNN Newsroom” collectively put up their hands in “hands up, don’t shoot” solidarity — echoing a narrative of police murder later proved to be completely false by a lengthy federal investigation.<\/p>\n

Decades-long journalistic one-sidedness was apparently tolerable when there were no other news alternatives. Mainstream-media monopolies once were also highly profitable, and long-ago liberal news people were at least well-mannered.<\/p>\n

All of those assumptions are no longer true. News outlets such as The New York Times and NBC have no more credibility than most websites or the National Enquirer.<\/p>\n

Is it any surprise that we are witnessing the funeral for traditional journalism as we once knew it?<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Town Hall | President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York\/Washington journalists.What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.No wonder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1092,92,145,187,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2wg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10340,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-morning-joe-tweets\/","url_meta":{"origin":9688,"position":0},"title":"Trump\u2019s Morning Joe Tweets","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 30, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson National Review's The Corner: The one and only. Just when the media take-out of Trump has backfired and exposed an endemic absence of journalistic ethics and chronic malpractice, Trump goes on another crass and extraneous Twitter attack against the increasing irrelevant MSNBC morning hosts (who have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9290,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-gift-of-immunity-to-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":9688,"position":1},"title":"Obama\u2019s Gift of Immunity to Trump","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Works and Days by PJ Media It is now old wisdom that Barack Obama created Trump\u2014as in the idea of a national pushback to Obama\u2019s out-of-the-mainstream agendas and the unconstitutional way in which he pursued them. Forgotten is the insulation that Obama has also provided\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11326,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ancient-war-between-the-press-and-the-president\/","url_meta":{"origin":9688,"position":2},"title":"The Ancient War Between the Press and the President","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The media are furious that President Trump serially decries \u201cfake news.\u201d He often rants that journalists who traffic in it are \u201cenemies of the people.\u201d Reporters have compared Trump to mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler because of his dislike of the press.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10820,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-trump-should-consider-a-post-twitter-presidency\/","url_meta":{"origin":9688,"position":3},"title":"Why Trump Should Consider a Post-Twitter Presidency","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 14, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 By now, the president\u2019s record has transcended his social-media idiosyncrasies. \u00a0 Almost every supposedly informed prediction about President Donald Trump\u2019s compulsive Twitter addiction has so far proved wrong. \u00a0 He did not tweet his way out of the Republican nomination. Spontaneous social-media messaging\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media"","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9908,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/presidential-payback-for-media-hubris\/","url_meta":{"origin":9688,"position":4},"title":"Presidential Payback for Media Hubris","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 2, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/Defining Ideas \u00a0 \u00a0This article is reprinted from Defining Ideas, an online journal at the Hoover Institution. To read the original article click here.\u00a0 Donald Trump conducted a press conference recently as if he were a loud circus ringmaster whipping the media circus animals into shape. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13511,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lethal-wages-of-trump-derangement-madness-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":9688,"position":5},"title":"The Lethal Wages of Trump Derangement Madness","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 7, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Think about it: For about five years,\u00a0anything\u00a0candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion. Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited\u2014regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 6 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 6 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lethal-wages-of-trump-derangement-madness-2\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9688"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9694,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9688\/revisions\/9694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}