Democracies risk 'losing souls' as media freedom erodes, group says

[Tsing Tao]

He casually said someone should shoot Hillary to show her what gun control is!

See, this is what I'm talking about.

Trump said: "“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.”"

Then you take that comment and say "Trump said someone should shoot Hillary to show her what gun control is."

Then the next person puts his or her spin on it and suddenly Trump is calling for Hillary's assassination. And you people wonder why so many don't believe the news anymore.

Trump claims that he was talking about 2nd Amendment people organizing against her becoming elected. Trump, as usual, make an awkward statement that could be construed a number of ways - but as usual, folks like yourself leap to the worst possible interpretation and then are surprised when others call you biased.

 

[newwurldmn]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/09/trump-gun-owners-clinton-judges-second-amendment

with the actual intimations.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Perhaps it was an intentional double entendre. It does sound like he said everything he could just shy of "someone please kill her." And he probably said it off the cuff and didn't mean it. But our (to be) President said it at a rally. Is that responsible?

He's brilliant at trolling, getting a reaction, then complaining the media is biased, and getting people to believe him.

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

My point was not to excuse Trump because of Hillary's misconduct. it was to point out, as TT said, the hypocrisy in the media in blowing up one and excusing and ignoring the other.

Hillary's conduct was actually far more egregious because Khan willingly entered the political battle field. He was sent out as a human shield, someone whose identity would prevent responses to his outrageous accusations. Either take it or get roasted by the lying media for "attacking" a gold star parent who also happened to be muslim.

Somehow the fact that one muslim served honorably and was tragically killed was supposed to end the debate on muslim immigration. What if the republicans used Maj. Nidal, the Ft. Hood islamist shooter and claimed he was representative of all muslims? Media heads would have exploded.

The Benghazi parents only asked to be treated with the minimal respect of not having the Sec. of State lie to them.

 

[Tsing Tao]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/09/trump-gun-owners-clinton-judges-second-amendment

with the actual intimations.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Perhaps it was an intentional double entendre. It does sound like he said everything he could just shy of "someone please kill her." And he probably said it off the cuff and didn't mean it. But our (to be) President said it at a rally. Is that responsible?

He's brilliant at trolling, getting a reaction, then complaining the media is biased, and getting people to believe him.

I read the article. Looks like the same slant you're presenting. Doesn't change the actual quote though, which is all that matters.

I agree, he trolls well. But only because so many people are so easy to be trolled.

 

[newwurldmn]

I read the article. Looks like the same slant you're presenting. Doesn't change the actual quote though, which is all that matters.

I agree, he trolls well. But only because so many people are so easy to be trolled.

Well the article actually shows both sides. You can hear him trail off. He realized he had gone down a bad path. It looks like the republicans were forcing more meaning into those words than the left was.

This isn't the only instance. He made fun of the reporter with the disability. He said a woman was too ugly for him to molest.

He trolls. And everyone takes sides. The Left probably takes him too literally. The right takes him too seriously. I think the right will be disappointed with the difference between his actions and words and the left will be relieved for the same reason.

 

[Max E.]

In light of President Trump ducking this past weekend’s annual White House Correspondent’s Dinner so that he could attack the news media in other, less hostile, venues, it is abundantly clear that the relationship between the press and the president has never been worse. It is also obvious that Trump, for the most part, is winning what has now become open combat.

Throughout most of the election campaign and his first 100 days in office, the news media hit Trump with blows which would have easily knocked any previous candidate/president down, if not out. While they got him to wobble a few times, however, they have never really brought Trump to the canvas.

It seems rather obvious now that, barring a massive negative event, that Trump’s base of support has a floor of somewhere around 40% and that those people are completely imperious to anything that the mainstream media reports about him. Polls continually show that massive portions of his voters simply don’t trust the news media enough to ever change their mind about Trump, so unless Fox News Channel suddenly hires Rosie O’Donnell to head their programming, his approval ratings will always remain near at least a subsistence level of support.

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There seems to be an understandable temptation to blame Trump and his supporters for this phenomenon. After all, if they just listened to facts and logic, and Trump stopped blatantly lying to them, then they would finally see what fraudulent buffoon he is, right?
Well, I tend to look at this equation differently. Trump didn’t break journalism or render it irrelevant, he simply was smart/lucky enough to take advantage of the circumstances which had already effectively killed it.

Let’s be clear about why journalism is currently dead and how none of this was caused by Donald Trump.

There are at least three basic factors which have destroyed the ability of good journalism to impact events (in case you doubt my premise, just ask Washington Post, which brought down Richard Nixon, but now collects a Pulitzer Prize for negative stories on a candidate who somehow still pulled off a miracle upset win). They are the importance of profits, the influence of popularity, and the impact of fragmentation. All three are also interconnected with each other.

It is no coincidence that journalism is this country had its greatest power during an era when owning a newspaper or a broadcasting outlet was almost literally a license to print money. Good journalism is expensive, not just because it costs a lot of resources to nail down a really good story, but also because you must be able to afford a TON of misses in order to be able find that one great “hit.”

Until fairly recently, news organizations were seen by their owners mostly as “loss leaders” maintained for the public good. However, once the old business model broke, that luxury soon went way. Once news outlets were forced to be profitable on their own, it fundamentally altered journalism for the worse because, inherently, telling the truth about important and controversial matters is very often extremely bad for business. When reporters get worried about losing their jobs, they stop taking the risks which are needed in order to do good journalism, or, even worse, engage in sensationalism in order to survive.

The increased pressure on the news media to make money coincided, unfortunately, with a dramatic change in the way that stories can be evaluated, which came about because of the explosion of social media. In the “golden era” of news, no one had any idea whether a particular story, or even an entire subject, had been popular or not. Editorial decisions were mostly, get this, made based on substantive considerations.

All anyone knew back then was whether a story was good reporting, or not. Today, every single story, at just about every outlet in the country, can and is evaluated instantly based on Internet traffic, Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, and highly-specific overnight ratings.

The tail is now completely wagging the dog. The popularity of a report is now ALL the matters and it has now become part of the news media’s DNA to evaluate what stories to do, and how to do them, based solely on how popular they are likely to be.

This means that popular myths get routinely elevated over unpopular realities, and it has reduced the truth itself from a heavyweight champion, to a 98-pound weakling. Consequently, the news media has been caught with their hand in the “fake news” cookie jar many times and trust in their credibility has understandably eroded dramatically. As I have often said, if CNN wanted people to trust it when it came to the Trump/Russia saga, perhaps they should have thought twice about obsessively chasing a missing Malaysian plane for months straight back in the spring of 2014.

Finally, all of this has occurred simultaneously with the most dramatic fragmentation of all of our media in the history of the United States, if not the word. There have never been more national outlets from which people can get their “news,” almost literally constructed to appeal to their personal beliefs and sensibilities.

This has caused two very important developments. First, people can easily avoid/discard any news they don’t like because somewhere there is an outlet which is happy to tell them, for instance, that Trump really was right about his crazy “wiretapping” claims. Second, huge numbers of Americans are able to avoid substantive news completely so that even when a big story breaks it doesn’t have nearly the impact, or the staying power, that it used to have.

Add to all of this our incredibly shrinking attention spans, and you can see how easily Trump really does benefit from having so many scandals. The news media, in their constant and desperate search for something “new” with which to satiate us, spastically moves on to the next one before any of them ever have a chance to sink into our collective consciousness.

As a “Never Trump” conservative, my biggest objection to Trump has always been that he has no regard for the truth and cares mostly about his own fame and fortune. Ironically, the very same thing can be said about most of the news media, which is probably why Trump is able to manipulate them so well and why these two entities really do deserve each other.

I would like to say that America itself actually deserves better than both of them, but I really hate lying.

John Ziegler hosts a weekly podcast focusing on news media issues and is documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud or email him at johnz@mediaite.com

 

[Optionpro007]

Tucker's interview to the same issue, different angle.