Here’s the latest on fake news and media bias.
AFTER NEARLY 60 YEARS AS A NEWS WONK, professionally and in retirement, I never thought I would see the day when a major television network would have to promote that it broadcasts “real” news. While waiting for my car to be serviced Monday, the TV set in the waiting room was tuned to the CBS’s Morning Show, and there it was on the screen during a break – CBS Morning News – REAL NEWS.
TRUMP’S FAKE NEWS MESSAGE WORKING – In addition to the above example, a number of stories appearing in the media last week seem to give credence to President Trump’s belief that the media is responsible for fake news.
In “Trump’s already largely won his war against the media,” a Washington Post article by Phillip Bump, he reports on a Marist College poll in which individuals were asked who they trusted more, the media outlet they like best or the president. “Even pitting a Trump supporter’s top pick of all of the media outlets against the president, the president wins,” according to Bump.
A Politico-Morning Consult survey, also reviewed by Bump, found that nearly half of Americans, a plurality, thinks that the media makes up stories about the president out of whole cloth.
“Among Trump supporters,” Bump wrote, “Trump has won his war on the media. After decades of declining public trust in the media (which helped him win the war), even many of those predisposed to dislike Trump seem to agree with one of his central arguments about the press: It acts unfairly.
IN PJ MEDIA, Andrew Klavan, a writer who hasn’t always been kind to President Trump, accuses the press “in their seething hatred of Trump and the people he represents, and in their likewise seething bitterness at the loss of the election, have transformed themselves into mustache-twirling villains of American society.
“If they could see themselves as they are, they would be ashamed, but because they all agree with one another, they are invisible to themselves.
INTERVIEWED BY MAUREEN DOWD in The New York Times, former President Jimmy Carter even had to agree that “the media have been harder on Trump than any other president,” and referred to the media’s willingness to cross the line when he said, “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”
FINALLY, AND ASTONISHINGLY – Ken Stern, former CEO of National Public Radio (NPR) and author of a new book, “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right,” wrote a compelling piece on liberal media bias in the October 21, 2017 edition of The New York Post.
Relating how liberals outnumber conservatives in the media, Stern wrote, “When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.”
He admits that this may seem like an unusual admission, but that it “comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio.”
Interestingly, Stern ventured out of his overwhelmingly Democrat neighborhood and engaged Republicans where they live, work and pray across the country from a hunting ranch in Gonzales, Texas to a bar in Youngstown, Ohio. “(They) see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias.”
Click here to read his informative piece in its entirety.
In conclusion, Stern scolds the east coast bevy of journalists, saying, “You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor (the New York – Washington DC Amtrak train), and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.”
SOMEONE WHO HAS DONE JUST THAT is Salena Zeto, who writes for The New York Post. I told you how she predicted the Trump win in Pennsylvania in my October 8, 2016 post. Last week, her piece “Democrats should be terrified by this governor’s race,” the campaign I wrote of here on October 22, 2017. Chatting with people living in the Winchester, Virginia area, she notes the disinterest in the election. “The Democrats have the most to lose. Once again, a race easily within their grasp could slip through their fingers because they failed to excite their base,” Zeto wrote.
