These clowns think a seat on the NSC is equivalent to an "on air personality"? The NSC's purpose is to ADVISE the President. The President doesn't want advice from Vindman so, may the door not hit him in the butt.
The Fake News Media has been near Pelosi-level meltdown since election night. They had treated Trumpâs campaign and supporters with an attitude of spiteful hilarity. The great irony in the mediaâs hatred, of course, is that his rise would not have been possible without them and their vain attempt to hijack the Republican presidential primary process to ensure Hillary Clinton had the weakest opponent possible. Ooops!
So have the media learned the lessons of 2016?
No. The only adjustment most media elites are making is to reject even more stridently the traditional standards and principles of their profession.
Sleepwalking into 2020
They claimed what was needed in 2020 was an even bolder rejection of the standards of neutrality and objectivity. As Margaret Sullivan, a columnist at Jeff Bezosâ Washington Post, explained: âOne of the things we didnât do well covering the presidential election last time was that we failed to distinguish between the serious and not so seriousâthe term false equivalency comes to mind.â
MSLSDâs Chris Hayes echoed Sullivanâs assessment: âTo me, the biggest sin of 2016 was proportionality. Particularly vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton and the email story, and then the Wikileaks story. . . . Thereâs no justification whatsoever for the proportion of coverage devoted to that story.â
Tanzina Vega, host of NPRâs âThe Takeaway,â concurred: âThe press has got to rid itself of the idea of a false equivalency.â
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, editor of the prestigious political journal Teen Vogue (ahem), recited the popular academic canard against neutrality: ââObjectivityâ is not even possible; everybody brings something to what theyâre reporting on whether they realize it or not.â
These journalists are arguing for more subjective editorializing and more bias.
A Low Opinion of the Public
Some even take it a step further, acknowledging that rather than report on the issues that the public sees as most pressing, media outlets use their voices to manufacture the issues and generate public concern for them through their coverage.
Nicholas Johnston, editor-in-chief at Axios, describes this kind of manipulation. âWe identified the themes we want our journalists to think about in 2020 and then get them to go force the campaigns to talk about them,â he told the Columbia Journalism Review. âWe picked seven issues that we think are very important and we plan to spend the election year going out on the trail and talking to the campaigns and voters about these issues. What if we find a candidate doesnât have a policy on climate change, or China or the future of capitalism? Thatâs great, letâs go call and ask him to make one because we think this is an important topic that the next leader of the United States should have a position on.â
These ignorant clown think they control the democratic election process. Rather than our open, free public discourse to determine which issues will be at the fore of the campaign, Johnston advocates a scenario where the media selects the issues that should be of concern to the public and then gins up coverage to generate public support for their objectives.
These journalistic biases are driven by a low opinion of the public, a low opinion that the public heartily returns to the Fake News Media.
Hayes Brown from Buzzfeed suggests that the public should look to journalists as educators, asserting that âmore journalists should engage in those actual conversations with people who just seem kind of confused.â
Steve Adler, editor-in-chief at Reuters, makes a telling statement: âOur craft is digging out information when the average person doesnât have the skill to do that . . . then providing the background and the context and the knowledge base that helps people figure out where they stand.â Note that Adler isnât saying that average people donât have the time or the resources to gather knowledge of political affairs: they lack the skill. Given that perspective, it is no surprise that so much ânewsâ writing carries with it a tone of pedantic exasperation.
