The worst enemy of the media? The media

They can’t seem to get out of their own way. We pointed out that after last week’s presser in which Trump called them everything but journalists, the AP set out to prove him right in every way by going with it’s false “National Guard” story and refusing to back away from it.

It is fascinating to see a narcissistic industry focus on a narcissistic president in a negative way (as opposed to a narcissistic industry focus on a president in a positive way – like they did with Obama). It’s simply the other side of the coin.  The difference is while they were willing, for the most part, to tolerate it in the Obama era, they’re adamantly against it in the Trump era and are busily trying to rewrite history by declaring his action’s “unprecedented”.

But is it?

While Trump’s behavior hardly befits an American president, he is also crudely mirroring the Obama administration, which spent its first year in office seeking to discredit Fox News as a respectable media outlet.

The Obama administration was calling Fox “fake news” before “fake news” was a phenomenon. In October of 2009, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that Fox was “not a news organization.” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn echoed Emanuel, saying that Fox “operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” “When we see a pattern of distortion, we’re going to be honest about that pattern of distortion,” said senior advisor to the president, Valerie Jarrett, when asked to defend the White House’s campaign against Fox.

Obama was still prosecuting the case against Fox nearly a year after the White House and the cable news network supposedly buried the hatchet. Just days before the 2010 midterm elections, Obama told Rolling Stone that Fox was cast in the mold of Hearst-era yellow journalism, and it pushes a point of view. “It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country,” Obama said.

Obviously it isn’t at all unprecedented, and those of us who were paying attention (which seems to not include much of the media and their opinion writers) watched it happen throughout the Obama era.  Apparently it was a pretty tolerable development when the majority of the media saw a certain outlet they ideologically disagreed with getting smashed by the President.  Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot and oh, the wailing  is loud and persistent.  Trump has worked the press into such a state that … well, that he’s able to act as editor.

Think about it.  So eager are they to play “gotcha” journalism when it comes to Trump, that they attack everything he says and end up covering exactly what he was wanting covered.  And they still don’t seem to realize that the details of the story are less important than the story itself.  For instance, did Hillary Clinton give “20%” of the nation’s uranium to Russia?  Darned if I know.  The story was “Hillary Clinton gave uranium to the Russians while she was Secretary of State and the Russians gave money to the Clinton Foundation.”

Oh.  So whether or not it was 20% really isn’t the big deal is it?  And now, much more of the nation knowns the real story and, I’d guess, really don’t care if it was 20% or 2%?

You get my point.  The precision of the details are less important than the surfacing of a story that was largely ignored.  Sweden is another example.  The fact that the country’s leaders are in denial doesn’t change the fact that there is an epidemic (at least by Swedish standards) of violent crime occurring mostly perpetrated by it’s immigrant population of muslims.  Facts are stubborn things and have a tendency to eventually emerge.  That’s what the editor Trump has successfully done in his first month in office.

This isn’t a new situation for the press.  They willingly put themselves in this corner when they threw all semblance of objectivity down the drain with their shameless worship of all things Obama.  They further did themselves harm with their “all in” attempt to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

No one feels sorry for them or the state they find their industry in but themselves.  They’re getting precisely what they deserve and have deserved for quite some time.

The question is will they double down on their current behavior and watch their credibility and approval slip below that of used car salesmen and Congress or will they take steps to right the ship and become professionals again?

I’m betting on the former.  How about you?

~McQ