Rick Wilson: How Media Dodged the 'Everything Trump Touches Dies' Curse

[babylonsister]

How Media Dodged the 'Everything Trump Touches Dies' Curse
Mainstream journalism has its sins, and bears some responsibility for electing Trump, but miraculously this president has unwittingly ushered in a golden age of great reporting.
Rick Wilson
08.24.18 9:32 PM ET


Conservatives waged war on the media for decades, and the media won. Far from spelling the end of the mainstream press, Trump’s election gave the national, professional mainstream media a moment and a mission that has produced a golden age of journalism. The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and MSNBC are expanding their audiences and prospering like never before.

The inverse of the ETTD curse? has been a blessing for the national media, as reporters have rediscovered a commitment to working sources, breaking news, and kicking down doors to get stories. Trump combines uniquely newsworthy behaviors: a constant flirtation with the edges of the law; a clown-car administration staffed by the corrupt, the creepy, and the craven; and a temperament better suited to an asylum than to the Oval Office.

snip//

That’s no excuse for the coverage of the 2016 Republican presidential campaigns or of this presidency, where coverage was driven by Infowars and Breitbart. Trump fans aren’t looking for up-the-middle coverage; they’re looking for partners in the fake news explosion that helped Trump win the election. If being a Republican means buying into stories so obviously, barkingly insane that they sound like Roger Stone’s conspiracy rantings after a three-day meth bender, then we don’t have a political party; we have an inpatient mental health facility. To remind you once again, a meaningful fraction of Republicans believed that Hillary Clinton was running a global child sex and cannibalism ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant.

If conservative media is to mean something outside the narrowest confines of the base, it needs to be honest, direct, and critical of our failings. Conservatives who legitimize the creepy authoritarianism, unalloyed racism, and apocalyptic religious and cultural war fantasies on the pages of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and the dog’s breakfast of other Trump fan “news,” they’re not building conservatism. They’re creating a filter bubble as wrongheaded and as dysfunctional as the one they imagine exists at The New York Times or MSNBC.

Good journalism ought to matter on the right and not fall into the slavish corruption of basic journalistic practices in service to the preferred narrative. Good writing and reporting ought to matter. As for my friends in the mainstream press, you’re not off the hook. No matter how much Republicans claim to hate the media, let’s be very clear: without the active participation of the mainstream media in the Greatest Scam on Earth, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president. The mainstream media helped elect him through its constant attention to his every utterance.

more...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-media-dodged-the-everything-trump-touches-dies-curse?ref=home

[Cosmocat]

1. I vould not disagree more

45 and the republican party are so deranged, so brazen and in your faxe with their malfeasance a high school newspaper could "uncover " it.

Yeah, the media is hitting ground rule doubles on 82 mph fastballs dead in the middle of the strike zone!

Meanwhile, the same underlying indulgence of conservative fuckwittery that has been in place for decades, and enabled the country to slide down into this rathole remains.

IF we get past 45, they will go back to their kissing the asses of conservatives and breathlessly enabling their bullshit generally and their bullshit negative frames of Democrats specifically.

Until they flat call republicans and conservatives the insane loons they are, and treat them as such, we will remain at the mercy of them.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

2. K&R. Could it be because....

it's likely most directors on the boards of our major media companies are...(drum roll).....conservatives?

It's not only our media. We must somehow break the chains of control the billionaire plutocrats have on every aspect of our existence. I have not yet convinced myself our general public has the will to do it. Most of us are far too enamored by the drugs of free-market consumerism and mass media sensationalism.

........... .............

[Cosmocat]

14. That certainly is a factor

Whoever controls the paychecks ...

That said, it just is pervasive at the higher levels. You can just see the disdain that higher level journalists have for "liberalism." People like Chuck Todd, to use the term journalist loosely. Yes, there are definitely people like John Heilman who are clearly progressive (sane) but these people who have those biases against liberals that are cast as honest brokers do a LOT of damage.

Watching him do mental gymnastics trying to blame BHO for congressional republicans refusing to work with him to try to create equivalence with Trump is watching democracy rot.

Just as an example.

I also don't think this country has the soul to get past it, either.

Someone on my Facebook feed posted a video of some kind of event where thousands of people attended that they took beat up old cars, set them up to speed off the side of a mountain at high speed into a cavern with a man made pond.

People thought it was cool.

I thought, this is emblematic of where this country is now.

We have a russian psychopath for POTUS, one of our major parties is enabling mass graft of the tax payer dollars, exploding our debt, and is DYING to destroy our social safety nets, but ...

COOL!!!!

Did you see how that old police cruiser's hood shot up into the sky when it hit the rocks!

[KY_EnviroGuy]

15. Yes, and I was spoiled by Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite and....

Mr. Dillon on Saturday night, LOL.

Never ceases to amaze me how Republicans and the corporate culture have managed to redirect the attitudes of America from 95% liberal in the 50s/60s to now - where we're constantly demonized. They really do seem to believe we would be better off under an authoritarian plutocracy where we literally rent everything in our lives, with the earth and her resources be damned.

Long term, I'm afraid we're doomed to that concept unless 1.) economic inequality is reversed and leveled, and 2.) all big money influence is stripped from our political campaigns and government's everyday operations (via lobbying).

Very difficult to stay positive these days for those of us that have seen much better times.

[BobTheSubgenius]

17. You sound like you are another boomer.

Sorry if I mistook that, and am trying to age you prematurely, but the references fit.

Yes, much, MUCH better times. Life was so EASY for me and my peers. It's not like our families were wealthy, but looking back, it sure seems like it from this vantage point.

We were young, and skiers quit their jobs in Nov. to collect Unemployment through ski season, knowing they'd just get another job in March. Likewise, beach bums and camping enthusiasts took their summers off.

And some of these jobs were absolute gold, compared to a lot of jobs today. A guy I know quit what could have been a decent lifetime gig - fulltime, permanent employee of the phone company, with good pay and excellent benefits....just not as good as Party Season.

Those days are NEVER coming back.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

18. Yes, that's the stranglehold capitalism has on us.

I'm 70 now and my parents went through the Great Depression and WW2 the hard way - very poor (farming and timber). Much of our days of better economic times with high happiness in life were pre-merger/acquisition days when companies gave a damn about both employees and the communities where they were located.

Almost every small town where I was raised in a TN farm belt had a garment factory (or two), a milk plant, one or two feed stores and three or four family-owned grocery stores. Also (typically) a radio/TV shop, at least one five-and-dime store, one or two jewelry shops, a hardware store, two or three clothing shops, three or four gas station/garages, usually two funeral parlors, a florist shop, at least one community bank, a couple of barber shops and a couple of small restaurants and a dairy dip. Plus, a grammar and high school, a fire house, city hall and police station and numerous small churches. Whew!! (my brain walking through town in around 1960, LOL). And guess what - they all thrived and made a good living!

Something's very wrong with this picture of today's America...... .......

[OnDoutside]

3. The underlying cause is that the right was losing the argument and

knew that cheating was their only hope of holding on to power. Only the utter obliteration will cause a realignment of US politics.

[SunSeeker]

4. "The mainstream media helped elect him through its constant attention to his every utterance."

True, but only because it was coupled with a concomitant failure to call out each such utterance as a lie. THAT was the key help they gave him. They became his megaphone, instead of practicing actual critical journalism.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Yes, about a BILLION DOLLARS free advertising by way of unbalanced coverage.

They thought Hillary would win so they wanted to make the race tighter. FOR PROFIT.

[central scrutinizer]

11. But her emails!

And their need to be “fair and balanced “ led to the false equivalency that was the hallmark of every broadcast. Led to many voters feeling both candidates were equally tarnished so why vote.

[SunSeeker]

12. Yep. Pure cowardice.

They cared more about what the right wing thought of them than the truth.

[2naSalit]

6. K&R

[PatSeg]

7. Well said

We are witnessing a golden age of journalism and the mainstream media bears a great deal of responsibility for the nightmare we are living now.

[yokbizzi]

8. Alfa Bank and Trump Tower Servers

Will the details of the Alfa Bank server in Trump Tower connected to a Trump Organization server and what this was used for come to light. I certainly hope so.

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/major-alfa-bank-trump-tower-breakthrough/

This chart in the story shows a high number of transactions from from June 28th to July 27, 2016.

Very interesting...

[Paka]

9. K&R

Wonderful read.

[Perseus]

10. "unwittingly ushered in a golden age of great reporting." - Not what has happened

The journalists that are coming out with the great stories and reporting now are the same who screwed up and helped trump get enough votes to be relevant in the election. I still think the Russians hacked the voting machines and gave trump the votes he needed in the key states to win the "Electoral College". And by the way, why is it that no one is talking about doing away with the farce that is the "Electoral College"? The "Electoral College" serves no real democratic purpose, it is a farce that can only help the cheaters, and we know who they are.

What has happened is that those same journalists have realized the mistake they made by giving trump more time than he is worth, and they are still doing it, but they are horrified about what is happening and lets face it, they have seen a great opportunity to gain notoriety because the man-child provides so many opportunities for discovery, its like a gold mine.

And although the opportunities are there, many of them still shy away from telling it like it is, they still talk about "falsehoods", or "misleading information" instead of calling it what it is, "lies".

The "golden age of great reporting." is due because now, like many of us, they are really scared of their contribution to making trump as popular as he has been, they are just doing some of what they should have done during the campaigns, they feel their guilt.

[ismnotwasm]

13. Ew

Wilson must have seen a different media than I did. He also dismissed social justice as “silliness” in this piece.

They spoke and wrote about Obama in terms so glowing and so toadying that it was easy to caricature the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squealing and fainting at his every utterance. That nearly mindless rah-rah remained a constant element in Obama’s coverage until he walked out of the Oval Office. Conservatives rightly mocked it, but the smarter types recognized it as an example of the normative power of media and pop culture. The two had combined in one fell swoop to overcome Barack Obama’s thin résumé, his lack of experience, and questions about his ideological underpinnings. Donald Trump wasn’t the first celebrity president. Yes, the press treated Hillary as Her Majesty the President-in-Waiting Glass-Ceiling-Shatterer-for-the-Epoch and ignored her terrible campaigns and clunky persona and the defective-robot affect she displayed on the campaign trail.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

[Scurrilous]

16. K&R

[KY_EnviroGuy]

19. Two key things Wilson's article does not address or confess..

1.) The outright lies and massive deception that's been pervasive in Republican and right-wing media for decades. He implies it but soft-pedals it. There must have been a hidden Reagan 12th Commandment that says: "never use the word lie or admit to lying".

2.) The massive layoff of journalists and editors across the country in the last twenty years or so, particularly in the print media industry.

One might also ask Mr. Wilson why a number of highly respected news outlets in Europe did indeed regularly call out Trump's lies and bullshit in no uncertain terms, while it was crickets in America.

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