TV News and Its Long Dark Night of the Soul [View all]

[babylonsister]

TV News and Its Long Dark Night of the Soul

Tunnel vision and faulty polls blinded television to what was happening during the election. But that's not all.

By Todd Gitlin | November 21, 2016

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But there are so many more crevices of the network soul that are long, long overdue for a thorough search. What about the incessant noise about Benghazi, where Clinton did not deserve any blame (but for which Republicans should have been tagged for cutting funds for embassy security)? What about Clinton’s damn emails? Or the Clinton Foundation, from which no one ever found any slush fund for Hillary, or any pay-for-play reward to contributors.

When we’ve counted up the networks’ scanty mention of Trump’s demonstrable lies about the operations of the Trump Foundation and compare them to the streaming mentions of the Clinton Foundation, where there were no lies — I’m working on getting the numbers — I’m pretty sure we’ll see the glaring discrepancy.

While newspapers, especially The Washington Post, devoted hundreds of person-hours to investigating Trump’s massively checkered past, the networks went easy on Trump throughout the primary season; they donated free time to his spectacular self simply because he was Donald Trump, a TV celebrity, and therefore newsworthy whenever he appeared or might be about to appear. Once he had won the nomination, maybe they were embarrassed; surely they came under fire for letting Trump get away with his preening. And then they did – intermittently — try to play catch-up.

But they never got down to a close look at Trump’s business arrangements abroad, arrangements still underway, arrangements which will expose him to more conflicts of interest than all the Clintons have been nailed for in all their decades in public life. Television never scrutinized Trump’s relationship to the mob; or the New Jersey corner-cutting that permitted him to line up a casino license in Atlantic City; or his hiring illegal workers to build Trump Tower; or…or…or…. They gave short shrift to his nasty treatment of contractors and his repeated stiffing of bankers, which led them to cut him off from further loans. Instead, they subscribed to the principle that the more sleazy you are, the less exposure you have to fear. To say, in extenuation, that there were too many Trump scandals to handle is to say that the networks were undone by the false equivalency imperative. The myriad undeniable Trump scandals, the vast expanse of lies and bulls**t, deserved the networks’ attention, however many there were.

Let souls be searched, then. But let the search not stop at the low-hanging fruit. Search the whole Trump show from start to finish. See how again and again the networks let themselves be tickled, dazed, bullied and bedazzled by a dangerous fool.