Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti wrote a column on Friday titled “Pop Goes the Liberal Media Bubble.” He argued that the ascent of Donald Trump has “precipitated a crisis” in the media, as they struggle with declining television viewership and newspaper/magazine circulation. He’s so outside their boundaries of decency and reason, they have to lash out at him daily.
In short, “journalists reacted to his election with a combination of panic, fear, disgust, fascination, exhilaration, and the self-affirming belief that they remain the last line of defense against an emerging American autocracy. Who has time for dispassionate analysis, for methodical research and reporting, when the president's very being is an assault on one's conception of self, when nothing less than the future of the country is at stake?”
Exactly. This inspired the overwrought mottoes like “Democracy dies in darkness.” The liberal “legacy media” simply don’t understand that they live in a bubble and can’t believe that all of their fevered “news” coverage of Trump doesn’t shake his supporters. But those supporters – some of whom voted for him reluctantly, favoring other Republican contenders – are often disturbed by the dire tone of the “news.”
Continetti cited a recent study by the moderate-to-liberal Pew Research Center (which didn’t just study “mainstream” outlets, but some conservative sources) and found that "about six-in-10 news stories about Trump's first 60 days (62%) carried an overall negative assessment of his words and actions.
That is about three times more negative than for Obama (20%) and roughly twice that of Bush and Clinton (28% each)." This, at a time when the stock market is at record highs, the economy is at full employment, and Americans are upbeat about the recovery. The president's inability to register majority approval in opinion polls may be unprecedented, but so is the amount of negative coverage he has received. Perhaps there's a connection.
The latest Media Research Center study by Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella again found network evening news evaluations of Trump were 92 percent negative, 8 percent positive. North Korea and immigration news were more than 95 percent negative. Even the hurricane recovery was a bad story.
Continetti noticed the media were invested in the idea of trying to make Hurricane Maria “Trump’s Katrina,” despite the dramatic difference in how many people were killed.
Ever since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, I have looked up from my desk to find San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz on CNN attacking the White House response. Her selection of hats and T-shirts was far more varied than her anti-Trump message. Her verbal assaults mounted to the point where she accused him of presiding over "something close to a genocide." Yet when Trump defended himself and FEMA on Twitter the next morning, it was he, not she, who was "lashing out."
The desire on the part of Trump's critics for Maria to become his "Katrina moment" is palpable. It has led reporters to disregard their own previous work on the dismal condition of Puerto Rico's governance, finances, infrastructure, education, and public health systems, not to mention the fact that it is more than a thousand miles away from the mainland. It has inspired articles suggesting that an influx of Puerto Ricans to Florida "could well prove to be a boon to Democrats." (They said the same thing before 2016.) It spurred Paul Krugman to circulate the fake news that cholera had appeared on the island. Most ridiculous was the Bloomberg story, "Trump's Puerto Rico Feud May Cause Lasting Damage to the GOP," whose authoritative and objective sources included an academic, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and John Brennan.
This is why journalists miss how many people see them as producing “fake news,” a wave of slanted commentary badly disguised as journalism.
What passes for news today is speculation and advocacy, wishful thinking and self-fashioning, mindless jabber and affirmations of virtue, removed from objective reality and common sense. The content is intended not for the public but for other media. In a recent interview with Peter J. Boyer about her institution's study of press coverage of Trump, Amy Mitchell [of Pew Research] said, "One of the things that was interesting to see was that, while the topic of the news media was not a huge percentage of overall coverage, journalists were both the second most common source type as well as the second most common ‘trigger' of the stories." The CNN anchors aren't talking to you. They are talking to one another.
The conversations that journalists in New York and D.C. and L.A. trigger among themselves have very little to do with the conversations between most people, in most places, at most times. The conversations are self-referential, self-sustaining, self-validating, and selfishly concern one topic: the president of the United States. That may be why his critics in the press are so fixated on his Tweets. Twitter is his way of talking back. It's how he pops the liberal media bubble.
