Rick Wilson: How Media Dodged the 'Everything Trump Touches Dies' Curse [View all]

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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.

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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.

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