Why the Media Has Broken Down in the Age of Trump: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, July 1, 2017— I’ve been a journalist for a long time.
Rage Is All the Rage, and It’s Dangerous: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2017— What we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement.
Israel, American Jewry and Trump’s GOP: Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post, June 22, 2017 — Earlier this month Norway, Denmark and Switzerland did something surprising.
Great Again: Conrad Black, American Spectator, June 21, 2017 — One of the straws in the wind that indicates that the Never-Trumpers are becoming uneasy…
Under Trump, Israeli Terrorism Victims at Least Get Genuine Condolences: Gregg Roman, Jerusalem Post, June 27, 2017
History, Precedent and Comey Statement Show That Trump Did Not Obstruct Justice: Alan Dershowitz, Algemeiner, June 8, 2017
Liberals Need to Stop Using Trump as a Shield For Their Own Incompetence in Losing An Election: Rex Murphy, National Post, June 16, 2017
This Summer's Most Maddening Pests are on the Climate-Crusading, Trump-Hating, Culture-Censoring Left: Conrad Black, National Post, June 16, 2017
WHY THE MEDIA HAS BROKEN DOWN IN THE AGE OF TRUMP
Michael Goodwin
New York Post, July 1, 2017
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.
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.
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…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
RAGE IS ALL THE RAGE, AND IT’S DANGEROUS
Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2017
What we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement. It is between those who support Donald Trump and those who despise him, between left and right, between the two parties, and even to some degree between the bases of those parties and their leaders in Washington. It is between the religious and those who laugh at Your Make Believe Friend, between cultural progressives and those who wish not to have progressive ways imposed upon them. It is between the coasts and the center, between those in flyover country and those who decide what flyover will watch on television next season. It is between “I accept the court’s decision” and “Bake my cake.” We look down on each other, fear each other, increasingly hate each other. Oh, to have a unifying figure, program or party.
But we don’t, nor is there any immediate prospect. So, as Ben Franklin said, we’ll have to hang together or we’ll surely hang separately. To hang together—to continue as a country—at the very least we have to lower the political temperature. It’s on all of us more than ever to assume good faith, put our views forward with respect, even charity, and refuse to incite. We’ve been failing. Here is a reason the failure is so dangerous. In the early 1990s Roger Ailes had a talk show on the America’s Talking network and invited me to talk about a concern I’d been writing about, which was old-fashioned even then: violence on TV and in the movies. Grim and graphic images, repeated depictions of murder and beatings, are bad for our kids and our culture, I argued. Depictions of violence unknowingly encourage it.
But look, Roger said, there’s comedy all over TV and I don’t see people running through the streets breaking into laughter. True, I said, but the problem is that, for a confluence of reasons, our country is increasingly populated by the not fully stable. They aren’t excited by wit, they’re excited by violence—especially unstable young men. They don’t have the built-in barriers and prohibitions that those more firmly planted in the world do. That’s what makes violent images dangerous and destructive. Art is art and censorship is an admission of defeat. Good judgment and a sense of responsibility are the answer.
That’s what we’re doing now, exciting the unstable—not only with images but with words, and on every platform. It’s all too hot and revved up. This week we had a tragedy. If we don’t cool things down, we’ll have more. And was anyone surprised? Tuesday I talked with an old friend, a figure in journalism who’s a pretty cool character, about the political anger all around us. He spoke of “horrible polarization.” He said there’s “too much hate in D.C.” He mentioned “the beheading, the play in the park” and described them as “dog whistles to any nut who wants to take action.”
“Someone is going to get killed,” he said. That was 20 hours before the shootings in Alexandria, Va. The gunman did the crime, he is responsible, it’s fatuous to put the blame on anyone or anything else. But we all operate within a climate and a culture. The media climate now, in both news and entertainment, is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating antipathy. You don’t need another recitation of the events of just the past month or so. A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head. New York’s rightly revered Shakespeare in the Park put on a “Julius Caesar” in which the assassinated leader is made to look like the president. A CNN host—amazingly, of a show on religion—sent out a tweet calling the president a “piece of s—” who is “a stain on the presidency.” An MSNBC anchor wondered, on the air, whether the president wishes to “provoke” a terrorist attack for political gain. Earlier Stephen Colbert, well known as a good man, a gentleman, said of the president, in a rant: “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.” Those are but five dots in a larger, darker pointillist painting. You can think of more.
Too many in the mainstream media—not all, but too many—don’t even bother to fake fairness and lack of bias anymore, which is bad: Even faked balance is better than none. Yes, they have reasons. They find Mr. Trump to be a unique danger to the republic, an incipient fascist; they believe it is their patriotic duty to show opposition. They don’t like his policies. A friend suggested recently that they hate him also because he’s in their business, show business. Who is he to be president? He’s not more talented. And yet as soon as his presidency is over he’ll get another reality show.
And there’s something else. Here I want to note the words spoken by Kathy Griffin, the holder of the severed head. In a tearful news conference she said of the president, “He broke me.” She was roundly mocked for this. Oh, the big bad president’s supporters were mean to you after you held up his bloody effigy. But she was exactly right. He did break her. He robbed her of her sense of restraint and limits, of her judgment. He broke her, but not in the way she thinks, and he is breaking more than her.
We have been seeing a generation of media figures cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump. He really is powerful. They’re losing their heads. Now would be a good time to regain them. They have been making the whole political scene lower, grubbier. They are showing the young what otherwise estimable adults do under pressure, which is lose their equilibrium, their knowledge of themselves as public figures, as therefore examples—tone setters. They’re paid a lot of money and have famous faces and get the best seat, and the big thing they’re supposed to do in return is not be a slob. Not make it worse.
By indulging their and their audience’s rage, they spread the rage. They celebrate themselves as brave for this. They stood up to the man, they spoke truth to power. But what courage, really, does that take? Their audiences love it. Their base loves it, their demo loves it, their bosses love it. Their numbers go up. They get a better contract. This isn’t brave. If these were only one-offs, they’d hardly be worth comment, but these things build on each other. Rage and sanctimony always spread like a virus, and become stronger with each iteration.
And it’s no good, no excuse, to say Trump did it first, he lowered the tone, it’s his fault. Your response to his low character is to lower your own character? He talks bad so you do? You let him destabilize you like this? You are making a testimony to his power. So many of our media figures need at this point to be reminded: You belong to something. It’s called: us. Do your part, take it down some notches, cool it. We have responsibilities to each other.
Conrad Black
American Spectator, June 21, 2017
One of the straws in the wind that indicates that the Never-Trumpers are becoming uneasy, as they are cantilevered out over the Grand Canyon while they try to attach credence to bad fairy tales about collusion and obstruction and unctuously incite thoughts of impeachment, is that some of the more sane commentators are asking for silence from the president’s twitter account. The claim is that the president has only himself to blame for his feelings of a “witch-hunt,” and if he were just quietly going about his business, the implication is that the atmosphere would become relatively serene. This is an implicit admission that the allegations and insinuations of presidential misconduct are unfounded.
There is room for legitimate discussion about whether Mr. Trump’s tactics are optimal, but only those who truly believe that he is stark, raving mad could conceive that he would be speaking and tweeting about illegal surveillance, fake news, malicious media and partisan harassment, if none of it were happening. The sane and civilized Trump-skeptics, such as Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan, have no faith that there is any scandal lurking in the president’s closet and just want it all to go away. Let him retreat from his tweets. It’s a well-intentioned thought but there are some problems with it.
This is a war and the object of wars is to eliminate the enemy. Donald Trump effectively claimed that the corruption and incompetence of the Bush-Clinton-Obama era was a declaration of war on the national interest and an affront to the patience of the electorate, and he attacked the entire political power structure directly and in practically every policy area. Since there was no argument for the reelection of the Democrats after the strategic and economic and fiscal debacle of the Obama years, nor any very strong Democratic argument furnished by Mrs. Clinton’s career, the only campaign, which was assumed to be a sure winner, was a smear job on Trump. In modern American politics, this normally starts with charges of racism, sexism, authoritarianism, heartlessness to the disadvantaged and reckless war brinkmanship. Financial corruption is imputed as explicitly as possible. All of this against a backdrop of sneers and guffaws from the national media. It didn’t stop, even after Kathy Griffin decapitated an effigy of Donald Trump, seven months after he was elected.
The war continues, and since Trump and his followers believe that they are rebelling against oppressively corrupt and incompetent government, and that they are responding to an assault on the presidency of unprecedented vitriol, at least since the Nixon era, the president doesn’t feel that he is the one who should engage in unilateral de-escalation. Preemptive concessions (to unfriendly foreign powers) were among the Trumpers’ many complaints with Obama. The Democrats and their media allies confected this scurrilous bunk about “the whiff of treason” (the Times’ Nicholas Kristof), and an assault “on American sovereignty as great as Pearl Harbor or 9/11” (the Times’ Tom Friedman). Now they want Trump to stop complaining about the avalanche of defamation they have brought down on him.
Almost every weeknight at about 7 the Washington Post announces unnamed sources have discovered some new ratchet in the investigation of the president. These almost always are debunked, or at least simply vanish. With all the ill-will Washington can muster, a city that voted 96 percent against Trump, none of it can get any traction. One of two things is going to happen. Either the Democrats, including all the major media outlets except Fox and the Wall Street Journal, are going to lower the volume and sanitize the innuendos, and teach self-muzzling to the most rabid slanderers on CNN and MSNBC, and a benign cycle of returning civility will start to unfold, or the legal and verbal skirmishing will escalate.
Everyone, including ex-FBI director James Comey, special counsel Robert Mueller, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, has condemned leakers and anonymous sources (though Comey admits to having leaked his version of a conversation with the president to try to assure the appointment of a special counsel, an act of very questionable propriety). The Justice Department has not yielded its right to prosecute those who illegally leak and publish confidential government information. Comey had no business deciding whether Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted. His need not be the last word on the subject and her emails and the antics of the Clinton Foundation are not in Mueller’s mandate. She and Comey are outright public suspects of wrongdoing. Former attorney general Lynch’s efforts to suppress the Clinton investigation, like the Obama administration’s questionable surveillance in the Trump Tower, and unmasking of confidential identities of those intercepted, are legitimate subjects of Justice Department curiosity…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
ISRAEL, AMERICAN JEWRY AND TRUMP’S GOP
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, June 22, 2017
Earlier this month Norway, Denmark and Switzerland did something surprising. Norway announced that it was demanding the return of its money from the Palestinian Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Secretariat, for the latter’s funding of a Palestinian women’s group that built a youth center near Nablus named for PLO mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi. Denmark followed, announcing it was cutting off all funding to the group. And last week, the Swiss parliament passed a resolution directing the government to amend Swiss law to block funding of NGOs “involved in racist, antisemitic or hate incitement actions.” For years, the Israeli government has been urging these and other European governments to stop funding such groups, to no avail. What explains their abrupt change of heart? In two words: Donald Trump.
For years, the Obama administration quietly encouraged the Europeans to fund these groups and to ratchet up their anti-Israel positions. Doing so, the former administration believed, would coerce Israel to make concessions to the PLO. But now, Trump and his advisers are delivering the opposite message. And, as the actions by Denmark, Norway and Switzerland show, the new message is beginning to be received. If the US administration keeps moving forward on this trajectory, it can do far more than suspend funding for one terrorism-supporting Palestinian NGO. It can shut down the entire BDS industry before Trump finishes his current term in office.
To understand what can and ought to be done, it is first important to understand the nature of the BDS movement. Under the catchphrase BDS, two separate campaigns against Israel and against Jews are being carried out. The first BDS campaign is a campaign of economic warfare. The focal point of that campaign is Europe. The purpose of the campaign is to harm Israel’s economy by enacting discriminatory, anti-Israel trade policies and encouraging unofficial consumer and business boycotts of Israeli firms and products.
The US Congress can end this economic war against Israel by passing laws penalizing European states for engaging in trade practices that breach the World Trade Organization treaties. The US Treasury Department can also push strongly and effectively for such an end in its trade negotiations with the EU. The Treasury Department can also investigate whether and how EU trade practices toward Israel constitute unlawful barriers to trade. Unlike the situation in Europe, where the BDS economic war against Israel is fairly advanced, efforts in the US to mount economic boycotts of Israel hit an iceberg early on due to the swift preemptive actions taken by state legislatures. In 2015, then-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley became the first governor to sign a law barring her state government from doing business or investing in companies that boycott Israel. Last week Kansas became the 21st US state to pass an anti-BDS law along the same lines. Last month, all 50 state governors declared opposition to BDS.
The second BDS campaign being carried out against Israel is a form of political and social warfare. Its epicenter is US academia. Its purpose is to erode US support for Israel, by making it politically unacceptable and socially devastating to publicly voice support for Israel on college campuses and more generally in leftist circles. As is the case with the economic BDS campaign, the best way to defeat political BDS is through state and federal government action. If state and federal governments withheld funding to universities and colleges that permit BDS groups to operate on their campuses, campus administrators, who to date have refused to lift a finger against these hate groups, would be forced into action…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Under Trump, Israeli Terrorism Victims at Least Get Genuine Condolences: Gregg Roman, Jerusalem Post, June 27, 2017—
History, Precedent and Comey Statement Show That Trump Did Not Obstruct Justice: Alan Dershowitz, Algemeiner, June 8, 2017 —In 1992, then-President George H.W. Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger and five other individuals who had been indicted or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra arms deal.
Liberals Need to Stop Using Trump as a Shield For Their Own Incompetence in Losing An Election: Rex Murphy, National Post, June 16, 2017—Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. That is not a complicated sentence. Nevertheless the fact conveyed in that sentence came as a monstrous shock to many of the best political minds, pundits and reporters in the whole United States.
This Summer's Most Maddening Pests are on the Climate-Crusading, Trump-Hating, Culture-Censoring Left: Conrad Black, National Post, June 16, 2017—It being the verge of summer, it is time to be ready to repel insects and philistines. One current infestation of philistines has raised the fatuous roar of lamentation over the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
