Do we need still need the "press"?

[SdoubleA]

I've never claimed to be an extremist on either side of the political spectrum. But while you're talking about RINOs, tell us how awesome Ronald Reagan was.

I don't claim to be an extremist either, just another individual tired of the ******** rhetoric from both parties who keep talking while they line their own pockets or push their own agendas to further their stoic beliefs. Hell....if both parties are right then that must mean no one is wrong. The same goes for liberals and conservatives in my book.

I wish both parties would get together and do something good for America and Americans for a change.

And as far as Reagan......the Country thrived after he stirred the proverbial pot. Or were you even there?

Please tell me how much good all the Presidents after him have done. Is the Country any better off?

 

[Glocktogo]

Truth can hurt sometimes.


https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/07/03/heres-how-to-deal-with-trumps-tweets-stop-caring-about-them-n2349760

That guy gets it!

Why the media has broken down in the age of Trump
By Michael Goodwin

Since President Trump was elected, the media landscape has divided and hardened more than ever. Even the once-unimpeachable New York Times has been guilty of “fake news,” while on Tuesday CNN had to retract an article that slimed a Trump aide based on flimsy reporting. In April, The Post’s Michael Goodwin delivered this speech at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Atlanta, analyzing how we got here — and how journalism can survive.

I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale — that most of what you read, watch and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.

It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at the New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government — and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men.” Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.

During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.

The rest of that journalistic ethos — “afflict the comfortable” — leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

A new dimension
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened. This was not naïve liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in modern times had seen anything like it. As with grief, there were several stages. In the beginning, Donald Trump’s candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn’t a serious candidate and should be treated as a circus act. But television executives quickly made a surprising discovery: The more they put Trump on the air, the higher their ratings climbed. Ratings are money. So news shows started devoting hours and hours simply to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.

As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.

Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious.

The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters.

One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many executives, producers and journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one-sided that last August, I wrote a column on the unprecedented bias. Under the headline “American journalism is collapsing before our eyes,” I wrote that the so-called cream of the media crop was “engaged in a naked display of partisanship” designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast. Day in, day out, in every media market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction — toward Clinton and away from Trump.

For the most part, I blame the New York Times and the Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.

On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided (and continues to provide) lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds. But from the beginning there was also a second element to the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it — George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And the Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.

But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that’s actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn’t cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn’t be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you’ve already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clinton was “normal” and Trump was not.

I say this with great sadness. I was blessed to grow up at the Times, getting a clerical job right out of college and working my way onto the reporting staff, where I worked for a decade. It was the formative experience of my career where I learned most of what I know about reporting and writing. Alas, it was a different newspaper then. Abe Rosenthal was the editor in those days, and long before we’d ever heard the phrase “zero tolerance,” that’s what Abe practiced toward conflicts of interest and reporters’ opinions. He set the rules and everybody knew it.

Here is a true story about how Abe Rosenthal resolved a conflict of interest. A young woman was hired by the Times from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. But soon after she arrived in New York, a story broke in Philly that she had had a romantic affair with a political figure she had covered, and that she had accepted a fur coat and other expensive gifts from him. When he saw the story, Abe called the woman into his office and asked her if it was true. When she said yes, he told her to clean out her desk — that she was finished at the Times and would never work there again. As word spread through the newsroom, some reporters took the woman’s side and rushed in to tell Abe that firing her was too harsh. He listened for about 30 seconds and said, in so many words, “I don’t care if you f–k an elephant on your personal time, but then you can’t cover the circus for the paper.” Case closed. The conflict-of-interest policy was clear, absolute, and unforgettable.

As for reporters’ opinions, Abe had a similar approach. He didn’t want them in the news pages. And if you put them in, he took them out. They belonged in the opinion pages only, which were managed separately. Abe said he knew reporters tended to lean left and would find ways to sneak their views into the stories. So he saw his job as steering the paper slightly to the right. “That way,” he said, “the paper would end up in the middle.” He was well known for this attitude, which he summed up as “keeping the paper straight.” He even said he wanted his epitaph to read, “He kept the paper straight.” Like most people, I thought this was a joke. But after I related all this in a column last year, his widow contacted me and said it wasn’t a joke — that, in fact, Abe’s tombstone reads, “He kept the paper straight.” She sent me a picture to prove it. I published that picture of his tombstone alongside a column where I excoriated the Times for its election coverage. Sadly, the Times’ high standards were buried with Abe Rosenthal.

Looking to the future
Which brings us to the crucial questions. Can the American media be fixed? And is there anything that we as individuals can do to make a difference? The short answer to the first question is, “No, it can’t be fixed.” The 2016 election was the media’s Humpty Dumpty moment. It fell off the wall, shattered into a million pieces, and can’t be put back together again. In case there is any doubt, 2017 is confirming that the standards are still dead. The orgy of visceral Trump-bashing continues unabated.

But the future of journalism isn’t all gloom and doom. In fact, if we accept the new reality of widespread bias and seize the potential it offers, there is room for optimism. Consider this: The election showed the country is roughly divided 50-50 between people who will vote for a Democrat and people who will vote for a Republican. But our national media is more like 80-20 in favor of Democrats. While the media should, in theory, broadly reflect the public, it doesn’t. Too much of the media acts like a special interest group. Detached from the greater good, it exists to promote its own interest and the political party with which it is aligned.

Ronald Reagan’s optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.

Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letters section in the New York Times — virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn’t a miracle; it’s a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, “I don’t agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it.” You don’t hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if you don’t agree. And they are having some success.

An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena.

But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump’s supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka’s company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch (who owns the New York Post) thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited the late Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market, all right — half the country!

Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.

As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That’s not a coincidence. In this, I’m reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people’s wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.

No one really talks about this because the media moves on every other 15 minutes, but Trump used the media better than anybody since Stormin' Norman did during the 1st Gulf War. I hope when Trump completes his run as POTUS, he writes a book called "How to Use the Media as Your Personal Stooges". LOL

 

[YukonGlocker]

Another thing that complicates our press system is the fact that a large percentage of the population expect more and more for free. Free music (e.g., Pandora, Spotify, legal and illegal downloads, etc.)...free movies...free art of all kinds via the internet...and artists can't survive and sustain on nothing...the same applies to journalism, where much of the information is free...which means the traditional media outlets are scrambling for alternative ways to pay overhead, labor, and keep the lights on. The new medias are battling for clicks because that's how they make money. We're in a transformative state, in a way, moving away from traditional medias to streaming-online, and "free", based medias. The average CNN and Fox News watcher is in their 60's...and when that generation dies off, their ways of consuming media will die with them. Most of us on OSA are not following CNN or Fox News, and could not care less what they are saying/doing.

 

[D. Hargrove]

I personally need to have CNN, FOX, MSNBC, Drudge Report, The Hill, Breitbart, The Mirror or even the National Enquirer. If not for the freedoms they have to publish everything from Fact to fiction and the entertainment value associated with each. If not for the various news outlets I might develop a severe Porn addiction with all the spare time i had to surf around the net. That would lead to a gambling issue at the casinos down the way that I have never been to because I am reading the news. The gambling issue would ruin me financially (I suck at cards) thus driving a wedge in my marriage that in turn would destroy my kids and force me to attend some 12 step program in patient facility. I would undoubtedly fall in love with a hot addict I met at the facility and further destroy what was left of my marriage. The divorce would leave me bankrupt and begging for work, the farm would be split up and all the implements sold. Leaving me to live in an old Vets home, hitting on 87 year old Korean War nurses. Bless the media, they are truly a lifesaver!

 

[Shootin 4 Fun]

I don't claim to be an extremist either, just another individual tired of the ******** rhetoric from both parties who keep talking while they line their own pockets or push their own agendas to further their stoic beliefs. Hell....if both parties are right then that must mean no one is wrong. The same goes for liberals and conservatives in my book.

I wish both parties would get together and do something good for America and Americans for a change.

And as far as Reagan......the Country thrived after he stirred the proverbial pot. Or were you even there?

Please tell me how much good all the Presidents after him have done. Is the Country any better off?

I feel like I'm watching the movie Billy Madison.

As far as Reagan, supporters of that clown probably shouldn't hangout on a pro second amendment forum.

 

[Glocktogo]

I feel like I'm watching the movie Billy Madison.

As far as Reagan, supporters of that clown probably shouldn't hangout on a pro second amendment forum.

Psst, Reagan wanted you to have a lot of machineguns, so long as you could afford them!

 

[sanjuro893]

I feel like I'm watching the movie Billy Madison.

As far as Reagan, supporters of that clown probably shouldn't hangout on a pro second amendment forum.

But he was SOOOOO CUTE!!!

 

[SlugSlinger]

I think people are confused about what defines the press and what news agencies are. We don’t need news agencies giving us the agenda based opinion. With the current technology, the news can be more direct and not go through multiple iterations based on what someone wants to project.

What we are going to see is more of this fake news being exposed, just like the video on this page from the Missouri Governor. Because of technology, it is easy to catch these agencies with fake news. I suspect, once these "news agencies" start getting hit in their wallet, things will change.

http://freebeacon.com/politics/mo-gov-greitens-calls-fake-news-state-legislatures-special-session/

 

[ConstitutionCowboy]

I don't like the news to be filtered through a bovine sphincter. Trying to glean the facts from the steaming pile of - eh - "news" is an odious and odorous task I would like to avoid. Thank the lord for rubber gloves, gas masks, and sound suppressing earphones.

Woody

 

[donner]

I think people are confused about what defines the press and what news agencies are. We don’t need news agencies giving us the agenda based opinion. With the current technology, the news can be more direct and not go through multiple iterations based on what someone wants to project.

oh good, yes, please explain the differences.