purplesparklies
Brilliant_Rock
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2010
- Messages
- 744
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
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