It's really not hard to figure out.
No one believes anything the media says anymore.
It's not surprising that after little more than a year in office many
people who voted for a president still support him. But it's also surprising
that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in
our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he
had before taking office. Unless it's the negative reporting that is the
problem, which I suspect is very largely the case. You can only ask adults to
participate in the fiction that a retweet of a wrestling GIF is a credible
threat of violence against some nerd reporters at a cable station or delight in
what you hope will be the failure of American trade policy before they decide
to tune you out. Very largely this had already happened by Inauguration Day,
but now the work of MSNBC and The New York Times and PolitiFact is complete.
Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what
is false and have decided that they do not much care either.
There was, I like fondly to imagine, a different course that might have been taken here. It is just possible, I suppose, that members of my profession could have exercised their reasoning faculties to decide what in the administration was good, what was bad, what was unremarkable or indistinguishable from what any modern president would do, what was painfully idiotic, what was, perhaps, evil. We chose not to exercise this responsibility. Instead we decided to indulge in our live-action roleplaying fantasies about being brave selfless journos taking on a mean demagogue because we love the Constitution so much.
There was, I like fondly to imagine, a different course that might have been taken here. It is just possible, I suppose, that members of my profession could have exercised their reasoning faculties to decide what in the administration was good, what was bad, what was unremarkable or indistinguishable from what any modern president would do, what was painfully idiotic, what was, perhaps, evil. We chose not to exercise this responsibility. Instead we decided to indulge in our live-action roleplaying fantasies about being brave selfless journos taking on a mean demagogue because we love the Constitution so much.
The morons in the media may have the memory
of goldfish, but those of us who still remember how they said Bill Clinton
getting it on with an intern in the Oval Office was no big deal aren't inclined
to take their solemn declarations that the God-Emperor banging the occasional
Playmate or porn star more than a decade ago is an imminent threat to the
Constitution.
The media killed its own credibility. Now they are Fake News and everyone knows it, even those who pretend to believe them. As Glenn Reynolds says, their chief occupation is now deciding what facts they are going to try to hide from the American people.
The media killed its own credibility. Now they are Fake News and everyone knows it, even those who pretend to believe them. As Glenn Reynolds says, their chief occupation is now deciding what facts they are going to try to hide from the American people.