Three excellent pieces on how the media has failed us--and failed us worse this election cycle than ever before: Brian Buetler, Todd Gitlin, Jurek Martin.
By the way, I disagree with Buetler in one important dimension. When Brian says "there is no shortage of journalists and outlets in this industry with a lot to be proud of...", he is lying. There is a great shortage. That is why Brian needs to come up with a list--a shortlist--of journalists and outlets to whitelist:
Brian Buetler: [Shame on Us, the American Media][]: "There is no shortage of journalists and outlets in this industry with a lot to be proud of...
...but the larger system we are a part of did not convert those inputs into a correct portrayal of the choice voters face in today’s election. This has happened before. The way journalists who covered the 2000 election portrayed George W. Bush, did a disservice to consumers, perhaps allowing the loser of the popular vote to keep the race close enough to “win” the electoral college.... Back then the stakes seemed relatively small. Obviously they turned out not to be. The difference today is that few people in the business are unaware of how enormous the stakes of this election are—and yet, conveying those stakes turned out not to be the media’s primary interest....
A key component of journalism is the framing and contextualizing of events and new information: How do you take that raw material and present it in ways that don’t just provide consumers with new data points, but help them suss out how critical those data points are and what they mean in the scheme of things? Here, major media outlets failed abysmally. The best illustration of this came just days ago, when a media monitor tallied the amount of time nightly news broadcasts devoted to stories about Clinton’s emails, and the amount of time they devoted to stories about all policy matters combined, and found that the former exceeded the latter....
As it turns out, the legislation that Trump might enact, though radical, is only a medium-sized story compared to more basic facts like his disdain for democratic norms and his temperamental unfitness for public service—just how dangerous it would be for him to be the president. Here, the story isn’t much better.... The final week of the campaign has been reminiscent of every relatively quiet stretch between Trump’s serial implosions (attacking Gonzalo Curiel, attacking the Khan family, attacking a former Miss Universe, or responding to the unearthing of the Access Hollywood video in which he boasted about committing sexual assault with impunity). When Trump wasn’t in the midst of a self-inflicted crisis, we were treated to breathless commentary about how he was once again “sticking to script”.... These past 10 days have been no different. On the rare occasion when Trump stories eclipsed the din of chatter about Clinton’s completely irrelevant emails, they were frequently about how Trump had shown “discipline” in the final stretch. In reality, on every single one of those days, he was saying outrageous and false things at a dizzying clip. Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel captured this phenomenon well on Sunday when he tweeted:
Stuff covered as "Trump on message" would have been covered as "Romney has nervous breakdown" four years ago....
Trump resembles the political leaders of the European far right, and his core supporters embrace him for that very reason; but this was generally not the way he was portrayed, and definitely not the way his supporters were portrayed. The inability of political media to process and communicate asymmetry between the parties is a genuine crisis.... An industry that bandies about terms like “fourth estate” to describe itself should constantly reckon with whether its lofty self-perception matches its output.... Not only did many news outlets lower the bar for Trump and never raise it; by doing so, they subjected themselves to the same dismal standard. Whatever happens Tuesday night, we have to do better next time—assuming that by next time, it’s not too late.
Todd Gitlin: The Media Rapture of Donald Trump: "Trump has perfected the dark arts of bullshit...
...Trump did not invent them. In this century, these propagandistic arts had already seen trial runs by George W. Bush and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Peace that caught John Kerry’s 2004 campaign in the headlights.... Donald Trump, according to Tony Schwartz, liked the term “truthful hyperbole.” Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to readers of The Art of the Deal: “I play to people’s fantasies.... People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
But Trump, the toxic bullshitter, would have gone nowhere absent the whole cultural welter of nihilistic attention-getting enterprises that we helplessly speak of as “the media.”... The golden epigraph will belong not to Trump himself but to CBS Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO Les Moonves, who spoke in February of the advertising cornucopia spilling down upon the network:
"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS", he said of the presidential race. Moonves called the campaign for president a “circus” full of "bomb throwing", and he hopes it continues.... "Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun,” he said. “I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going,” said Moonves...
Jurek Martin: The Hillary Clinton Hate Campaign Has Twisted America: "Hate is the new four-letter word in America...
...Hillary Clinton is what she is, or appears to be, today because America has been taught to hate her for a quarter of a century, and if you say something often enough it sticks.... Go back to 1992, when Republicans were cock-a-hoop and conservatism was seeking to build on the Reagan presidency.... Then, out of left field, to be precise Arkansas, there emerged Governor Bill Clinton and he was clearly a different sort of Democratic cat--young, articulate, empathetic, centrist and with a political intelligence to be taken seriously. All the things that the first President Bush, for all his other good qualities, was not. So decisions were taken to unhorse him before he started galloping and, if necessary, to delegitimise him if he became president, which, of course, he did....
Who were those behind it?... Much of the blame for the lack of civil political discourse in America can be laid at the feet of Mr Gingrich--and he is still at it as a rent-a-quote (and adviser to Donald Trump).... The American Spectator magazine, a conservative publication that imported a British hatchet hack for more muscle, and the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, one of whose strident editorials was apparently a factor in Vince Foster, the White House aide and long-time Clinton confidant, taking his own life (which was followed by charges from Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana that he was murdered, by or on the orders of Hillary Clinton).... Fox News... directed by Roger Ailes, an old hand in the dark arts and a White House aide in Richard Nixon’s time.... Rush Limbaugh was drawing ever larger audiences and spawning a host of copycats (Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity etc).... Regnery.
Hillary Clinton called the cabal “a vast rightwing conspiracy”. The truth is that it wasn’t that big but it was effective and it did not let up. And then the president presented it with a gift — his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.... These were heavy crosses for his wife to bear and they followed her for the next dozen years into the Senate and the state department. You do not have to be Jeeves, who solved Bertie Wooster’s problems by applying “the psychology of the individual”, to come to the conclusion that her defensiveness is a product of these experiences....
Mr Trump is a relative johnny-come-lately... though calling her a criminal and promising to throw her in jail raises the venom to a new level. But he has been planting his seeds in well-tilled soil. Americans,a in fact, had been carefully taught to hate Hillary, and not just her — it hasn’t exactly been easy for the first black president either. As another part of the song goes, “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid/of people whose eyes are oddly made/and people whose skin is a diff’rent shade.” That is not an inaccurate picture of too many attitudes in the country today.
