Jim Geraghty:
We’re eight months into the Trump presidency, and we can now draw one frustrating conclusion: Very few of the voices opposed to the president want to learn anything from their experience in 2016.
The media will not slow down and make sure they get the story right as well as getting it first. Does it feel as if the country’s largest news organizations attempted any serious self-reflection about how they covered the 2016 election? Are they attempting to be more fair-minded, more dedicated to accuracy, resisting groupthink and the temptation to become an echo chamber? Hardly. At Politico, journalism professor Mitchell Stevens boasts with pride, “Our most respected mainstream journalism organizations are beginning to recognize the failings of nonpartisanship.” Yeah, that was the problem with 2016, journalists just weren’t clear enough about which candidate they wanted people to support.
Almost 63 million people heard the mainstream media’s encyclopedic criticism of Donald Trump in 2016 . . . and they voted for him anyway. They either didn’t believe the criticism or didn’t find it sufficient when confronted with the alternative of a Hillary Clinton presidency. One of the axioms of self-help is “if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.” In the aftermath of the greatest upset in presidential election history, most of America’s media have decided to keep doing what they’re doing.
Are the issues debated in Washington any more serious and substantive, any less focused through the prism of personality and conflict and the shallow measurement of “optics”? Before you answer, consider that the Washington Post wrote more than 900 words in the Style section about the “black snakeskin stiletto heels” that Melania Trump wore while walking from the White House to Marine One, beginning a day meeting hurricane victims. (She changed on the plane and emerged in Texas wearing sneakers.)
American society has never lacked outrageous controversy-courting personalities who probably need several hours (or years) on a therapist’s couch instead of being taken seriously. But in the Trump era so far, our public debate is more focused, not less, upon these types, and we keep rewarding these gadflies with fame and a high-profile platform.
Harvard offered and then rescinded a fellowship to Chelsea Manning, convicted of six counts of espionage. Perhaps Harvard was expecting a scintillating lecture that called for abolishing the CIA and the presidency, or that Manning would once again compare U.S. immigration enforcement to the Gestapo. Vogue gave Manning a glossy profile, complete with glamorous photos by Annie Leibovitz.
Upon arrival at NBC News, Megyn Kelly profiled Alex Jones, who worries that chemicals are turning frogs gay and who has asked whether the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. (She described him as a “conservative radio host.”) The Huffington Post still reports the utterances of Kathy Griffin, who thought that it was a good idea to pose, ISIS-style, with a fake severed head, dripping fake blood and made to look like President Trump’s.
Members of the media are finally growing reluctant to re-tweet the increasingly outrageous claims of Louise Mensch; all it took for serious skepticism to kick in was her claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin had Andrew Breitbart killed, that both Steven Bannon and President Trump were facing the death penalty for espionage, and that Utah senator Orrin Hatch was preparing to assume the presidency.
These are not mavericks, visionaries, or iconoclasts, boldly asking the questions no one else dares. These people are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. The media is now so diversified that there are no common standards of what is newsworthy; any sufficiently outlandish claim or act is worth spotlighting because it will generate traffic. An unhealthy part of our public debate amounts to trying to reason with people whose alphabet doesn’t go all the way to Z.
The Democratic party’s leaders haven’t changed their methods, either. They denounced Trump and his “Deplorables” and the rest of the Republican party in the most furious terms in 2016, but that didn’t produce the results they wanted. In 2017, Democrats decided to just keep on doing that, but with more profanity.
Representative Maxine Waters calls the president and his allies “scumbags,” while DNC chair Tom Perez declares, “Republicans don’t give a s*** about people.” The outgoing California Democratic-party chairman leads a chant of “F*** Donald Trump!” Little-known Democratic lawmakers create national headlines by calling Trump the p-word, “ “fascist, loofa-faced, s***-gibbon,” and wishing for his assassination.
I understand it is overused and simplistic, but it is true nonetheless; the left is still carrying on an extended temper tantrum over not getting what they wanted… what they promised themselves without having the means to deliver.
Hillary deserved to lose and, more importantly, NEVER deserved to win. After her loss, she demonstrated why she should never have been allowed into the White House and behind the Oval Office desk; she is a dishonest, disreputable, corrupt liar.
We see these whiners bemoaning Trump’s language; that he said “son of a bitch”. This article reminds us of the language that has become commonplace (and cheerfully acceptable) on the left, not to mention vile, violent images and actions.
It’s just a big, long temper tantrum and the left works ceaselessly at keeping themselves worked up to a hateful frenzy. They call Trump a racist… with no history of racism. They call him a white supremacist… without a hint of supporting it. They call him failure… as he achieves more in less than a year than Obama did in 8. All this is to make sure the mindless hate does not subside and, blinded by hate and devoid of all rationality and reason, choose another anti-Trump candidate that will be assured to lose in the mainstream.
And why wouldn’t the DNC push this strategy? One would have to be deaf, dumb (and not in the lack of speech context) and blind to have voted for Hillary, yet that same bloc is infuriated to the point of insanity that she is not President today; why moderate?
Instead of accusing and blaming the Russians for controlling the election, you liberals better be allying yourself with them. Voter fraud is your ONLY hope, as long as you pursue fascist socialism.