The unbearable smugness of the press

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Will Rahn:

The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doingwhen he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

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The NEW YORK SLIMES,WASHINGTON COMPOST,ATLANTA URINAL/CONSTIPATION,MEDFORD MAIL/TRASHBIN,SLIME(Magazine)PEEP-HOLE,ROTTING STONE and the talking heads lie so much only 32% of the people still trust them

The liberals that take office and abuse their power are despicable people, but they are not the ultimate villains; the MEDIA is. Without the media, Obama would not have been President and Hillary would never have survived the primaries. The media promotes the liberal agenda.

I cannot think of a legal way to curb this. The 1st Amendment is perhaps THE most sacred of rights. So, it is up to the PEOPLE to set this to right. Trump’s election is a start. However, the lesson of his victory is that a person speaking to the people in their language and to their concerns can overcome (just barely) liberal media bias should not be overlooked and should be exploited mercilessly.

The same harassment should be turned on tax exempt organizations that actually VIOLATE their tax exempt status… like Media Matters, who exclusively attacks conservative causes and supporters and is financially propped up by George Soros, who should be deported as a criminal enemy of the state.

I don’t believe that the media will ever figure that they’ve been lecturing in an empty hall all of this time.
They seem to think that they just haven’t been lecturing loudly enough.

They are already whining about lack of access to Trump. I think he should charge them to ride on Air Force one, rent them seats in his press conferences and make them pay for press releases. Maybe he can reverse Obama’s national debt.

the same liberal media that emplyed Katie Couric who lied about guns and gun owners big time

They reported at day and night the republican party is dead DT is its death, yo reporters media why dont you report at the death of the democrats at every single level of government. Republicans are in power deal with it, evolve or at least adapt.