Think about this: The media are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to do what they do freely. The president of the United States is a creation of the Constitution. Both are extremely important.
Because of the importance of the presidency, the media believes it is essential to hold the president accountable for the way he does his job, because if he does it poorly, that's a very bad thing for the country. No argument here.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
So . . . if the media does its job poorly, who holds it accountable? And should anyone do so?
What President Trump has been saying in recent days about the media is nothing I and others haven't been saying for years. If you listen to the media in all their sanctimony these days, you would think Trump is attempting to rid America of its free and independent press. That's why they keep saying silly things like: Attacking the press is how dictators rise to power!
Trump is not trying to get rid of the free press. Trump could not do that if he tried. He doesn't have that kind of power. But Trump recognizes the same thing many others do: In recent years, their job performance has been abysmal. And in the aftermath of his much-ballyhooed (and misreported) press conference, he brought the message home with this tweet:
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
Enemy of the people? Strong words! Radical suggestion!
No. Not really. Sure as hell not to me.
In 2013, I said this very thing about the New York Times. In 2015, before Trump was even running for president, I made the same exact charge as the media were whipping people into a frenzy over religious freedom laws. In September 2016, I said it in other words after they intentionally caused race riots with completely false reporting about police-involved shootings. Two days later, I said it again about one particular cockroach at USA Today, calling him an enemy of free speech because he tried to ruin the career of a baseball player for expressing an opinion.
So sure, it doesn't sound radical to me. It sounds right on.
First Amendment champions my #.
But let's be very clear about what we mean here. As Trump said at his presser, we want the press to be free and independent and to do their jobs well. This is very important to the nation. Without a free and independent press doing their jobs well, we have serious problems.
And right now, we don't have that.
What we have instead is an entire profession engaging in self-important groupthink, playing up narratives that advance certain agendas while ignoring other things that happen either because they are personally not interested or because they fear how public opinion would be affected if they gave these things attention.
In fact, we should start by destroying the notion that the media love the First Amendment and are its champions. Bolshevik. They are not. They are champions only of the parts of the First Amendment that benefit them. If they were really First Amendment champions, they would be going to bat for Baronelle Stutzman, who is losing her livelihood because she wouldn't be forced to violate her religious beliefs. If a court forced a journalist to do something that was thought to violate journalistic ethics, the entire industry would have a collective cow. But trash the First Amendment rights of this Christian woman? Crickets.
First Amendment champions my #.
But all you have to do is look at their behavior during and after Trump's Thursday presser to understand how far off the rails they've gotten. We dealt with this on Friday, so I'll just sum it up briefly here. Trump spent the first 35 minutes updating them and the public on the governing he's been doing - the issues of substance that are his job and that are supposed be the focus of their coverage. Given the chance to ask him questions, they almost completely ignored all that and asked him the same question over and over again about whether his campaign coordinated with the Russians. After he told them again and again that it did not, they went on a rampage claiming he had not answered the question.
Then they accused him of being a racist because of a totally innocuous exchange with a black reporter toward the end of the presser.
In the aftermath, they continued to ignore the substance of the things Trump talked about and focused on his criticism of them. And yet the very next day, the Associated Press provided a textbook example of what Trump was talking about when they published a false story claiming Trump wants to send 100,000 National Guard troops to round up illegal aliens.
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Media's incompetence and malfeasance
There are real consequences of the media's incompetence and malfeasance, some of them deadly. The Ferguson riots were the direct result of the media playing up an angle on the Michael Brown shooting that turned out to be totally false. They led people to believe Brown had put his hands up and said "hands up, don't shoot" before Officer Darren Wilson shot him. This was totally false. Even the Obama Justice Department came to that conclusion. Yet people were hurt, property was destroyed and Officer Wilson lost his job because the media embraced this angle for months.
Reporters are now fretting that some of them might be physically attacked as a result of Trump's criticism, which they think might inspire some nut. If that's a legitimate concern, why can't we lay the recent ambush shootings of police officers at their feet? Hmm?
There all also broader consequences stemming from the irresponsible way the media do their jobs. One is that far too much of the American public is ignorant about the real threats facing this nation. We are approaching $20 trillion in debt, and unfunded entitlement obligations top $100 trillion by some estimates. This is a massive problem. The nation's survival depends on our ability to address it. But most people have no idea how serious these problems are because the media ignore them in favor of stories about transgender heroes and whatever else their favored narratives require.
You wouldn't know the sorry conditions of ObamaCare exchanges unless you check the conservative alternative media, because you certainly won't see it in the headlines of the MSM. You might read about pipeline protesters, but you won't gain any understanding of how desperately the nation needs to improve its energy infrastructure, because they either don't know or don't want to tell you. You probably don't know that Democrats stopped passing budgets in 2010, because the media didn't think this was a big deal. It's a fundamental constitutional responsibility, but hey, why give Republicans a talking point?
In recent years the media have developed particularly sneaky ways of pushing their bias while pretending not to. One of the worst is the rise of so-called "fact-checker," which sees an opinionated reporter offer rejoinders to things politicians say - usually mixing a healthy portion of his or her own opinions in with highly subjective "facts," then declaring that someone had "pants on fire" or earned "four Pinnochios" simply because they said something with which the reporter disagrees. The media sell these "fact-check" pieces as authoritative arbiters of truth, and gullible people dutifully share them on social media as if they settle arguments. They do not. They are merely the latest example of people with a bias pretending to be neutral.
They are obsessed with trivial "gaffes" and gotcha moments. They are obsessed with optics. They are obsessed with race, and seize on every wrong word or inflection to imply that a disfavored person is a racist. And above all else, they are obsessed with themselves and their own importance.
They understand nothing about religion. They understand nothing about business. They are hostile toward traditional notions of morality. They are hostile toward free-market capitalism.
All of this matters because a nation will lose its way if its primary sources of information push false narratives, misinformation and trivia while failing to deal responsibily with the truly serious issues that face the nation.
I studied journalism in college and was the editor in chief of the student newspaper. I wanted to be nothing else but a journalist, and I believed in certain principles of the profession: That you reported facts and not your opinions, and that you used anonymous sources only in the most extraordinary of circumstances because the known credibility of your sources was so crucial to the trustworthiness of your own work.
Today, political reporting in this country is ideologically driven for the purpose of bringing down the current president, and the use of anonymous sources is as commonplace as writing a byline. And this after eight years of cheerleading for a president who was no friend of the press, but was their ideological ally.
The media have never had a president hold their feet to the fire like Trump is doing
The media have never had a president hold their feet to the fire like Trump is doing. They think its their job to hold his feet to the fire, but that they are so sacrosanct that no one - particularly him - can do it to them. Now they feel threatened, but the only thing that's really happening is that their own poor performance is being exposed in a high-profile manner.
Trump does not like them and will probably never like them, but if they do their job competently and fairly - focusing on facts and on the issues that really matter to this country - Trump would stop attacking quite so viciously. I don't think they will do that, though, because they see themselves as at war with him. They were the ones who started the war during the campaign, when they decided it was their job to do anything they could to keep him from being elected - to abandon objectivity and become openly oppositional toward him. Trump joined the battle. Trump won. Now they don't like how the war is going.
Well, they shouldn't have started the war, and they can stop it by doing their jobs the way journalists are supposed to do their jobs. That doesn't mean licking Trump's boots by any means. Trump does make a lot of mistakes and news coverage should reflect that. But Obama made a lot of mistakes too. He should not have been treated by the MSM the way we treat him here because this is an opinion-driven site, but America should know about some of the problems we face as a result of Obama's policies. By and large, the public does not.
Cover Trump honestly and fairly, with an emphasis on governance and policy substance. These are the things that really affect the American people. Do that and the media will regain the public's trust, while the public will regain an understanding of some things it really needs to know.
But if the media continue on its current path, the nation will suffer from ignorance while some of the worst actors in the political world are empowered. That is a terrible thing, and yes, it makes them an enemy of the public. They don't like Trump saying it, but the charge is resonating precisely because they wear it so well.
A free and independent press is crucially important, which is exactly why it's such a big problem when the free and independent press conducts itself so dishonestly and irresponsibly. They need to stop with the sanctimonious BS about how important they are, and start considering how to do their very important job in a way that benefits the country instead of harming it.
