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Political press to blame?

purplesparklies

Brilliant_Rock
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Written by a neighbor of mine.


The unbearable smugness of the political press
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, they 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, they 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’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the political press, a sense that they were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for their 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 doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate the political press, and have for some time.
The political press love mocking Trump supporters. They insult their appearances. They dismiss them as racists and sexists. They emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet they reject our feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the political 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 the political press duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can the political press do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept the political press gospel?
The political press diagnoses us as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. The political press, at their worst, see themselves as a priestly caste. They believe they 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 they 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 the political press, speaking broadly, their diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than they realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than they 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.
That’s the fantasy, the idea that if they 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 smug incredulous pundits. The political press exists primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs their attitudes toward all disagreement.
The political press increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such a scribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. They 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.
That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads the political press to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, they retreat further into their bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.
As a direct result, The political press gets it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, the political press forgets to ask the right questions. They can’t even imagine the right question. They go into assignments too certain that what they find will serve to justify their biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further -- fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup -- which starts the cycle anew.
The political press has to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what they are losing in the process.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 

Bonfire

Ideal_Rock
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Re: Political press to blame?

Excellent article. Thanks for posting.
 

Matata

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redwood66

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Re: Political press to blame?

Matata|1478971875|4097475 said:
Everyone shares the blame. It's what we do going forward with what we've learned that matters. Here's another perspective on who is to blame and how it should be fixed.
http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/11/10/white-christians-who-voted-for-donald-trump-fix-this-now/

People doing those things should be condemned and called out for their disgusting comments. I don' think anyone here would ever promote that kind of reprehensible act. If you see it then you have to stop it whether you are Christian or not.
 

Bonfire

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Re: Political press to blame?

Another thought provoking article. Thanks for posting. I live outside of a city that has the highest gun violence in the country. This did not just happen overnight. This gang violence has been escalating over many years. It didn't improve with Obama in the WH, infact it worsened. The Black voters did not come out in support Hillary. We have a mess on our hands and we all as Americans are culpable.
Give me something positive. I'm so sick of the blame game, it gets us nowhere!
 

siamese3

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Re: Political press to blame?

For me, the positive lies in the fact that in life, and in the world, things just don't move backward. The world evolves, people evolve. People romanticize the past. It's simply human nature. Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forward.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” ~Albert Einstein
 

Bonfire

Ideal_Rock
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Re: Political press to blame?

I think the subject of this thread is interesting as the mainstream media is very biased to the left and not fairly representative of both sides. I'm not just referring to this election cycle. They do all Americans a disservice by this.
 

siamese3

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Re: Political press to blame?

I don't even know if there really is a "mainstream" media anymore. Many people listen to what they already think, so they are not being exposed to different ideologies. People gravitate to like minded individuals. This, compounded by the fact that the national news on the "mainstream" isn't really news anymore, but more like entertainment. You can click on whatever newspaper you want. Everything online is being analyzed to then feed you back your own like ideas. Many people only get their news from comedy shows... I do agree that the political press did seem to get more biased but I also believe that was due to DJT and his treatment of the media.. although there is certainly enough blame to go around for everyone.
 

Bonfire

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Re: Political press to blame?

I agree people generally listen to what they want to hear. I guess I'm old school believing the media has a responsibility to report fairly. Inclusive of all forms of media not late night talk shows however! :lol:
 

distracts

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Re: Political press to blame?

siamese3|1478976125|4097506 said:
I don't even know if there really is a "mainstream" media anymore. Many people listen to what they already think, so they are not being exposed to different ideologies. People gravitate to like minded individuals. This, compounded by the fact that the national news on the "mainstream" isn't really news anymore, but more like entertainment. You can click on whatever newspaper you want. Everything online is being analyzed to then feed you back your own like ideas. Many people only get their news from comedy shows... I do agree that the political press did seem to get more biased but I also believe that was due to DJT and his treatment of the media.. although there is certainly enough blame to go around for everyone.

Yeah a lot of the most "mainstream" news sources just seem to give sound bites with little actual detail... I can't stand watching the news because the views are all so shallow. Newspapers engage in a lot of this fake "balance" stuff where they will give fringe ideas 50% of the coverage in order to look like they're being fair, which imo is actually a disservice to truth. It is hard to find media sources I trust because I like to read things that aren't spun around to where I can't tell the sky from the ground, and I don't like to see false equivalencies, logical fallacies, and so on. I want truthful and accurate news. I don't think things need to be made "fair," like if a politician lies why can't the news just straight-up say they lied, this is what the truth it, rather than having to get an alternative explanation about it? idk.

During GWB's presidency in addition to newspapers I read blogs from both sides of the political aisle. I had a rule that I had to spend 50% of my time on D blog and 50% on R blogs. That became impossible to do at some point after Obama was elected because all of the Republicans I used to read were driven out of the party and became reluctant Democrats, and the remaining Republican blogs were too racially toxic and unhinged from reality for me to handle. During this election cycle I started seeing blogs on the left that are just as unhinged from reality but in the opposite direction, and I had to make a list and block them on my browser so if I clicked on one I would know not to trust what it said. I personally like being exposed to different ideologies but the right-wing news-sources like Breitbart etc are too extreme for me to read without feeling nauseous (plus the whole thing about how Trump paid Breitbart for favorable coverage - so not only extreme, but corrupt as well!).

So. I dunno.
 

Karl_K

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Re: Political press to blame?

The press got it wrong because they listened to each others biased elitist babble instead of what the American people were saying.
The press has made itself irrelevant because much of the country just tunes them out as annoying noise.
They tried their hardest to destroy Trump and it didn't work and it will continue not to work and they will just dig
themselves into a deeper hole of distrust.
 

VRBeauty

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Re: Political press to blame?

The final chapter of this story is yet to be written. Just saying...
 
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