Commentary
Trump vs. Media
While the headline in the Wall Street Journal reads, “Trump vs. Media Returns to White House,” the leftist media are beginning to wonder if their fight against Trump is worthwhile.
Between 8 and 11 p.m. on Election Night, Fox News Channel had 10.3 million viewers, followed by MSNBC with six million, ABC with 5.7 million, NBC with 5.5 million, CNN with 5.1 million and CBS with 3.6 million.
The two leftist networks saw their lowest primetime ratings post-election – MSNBC viewership down 23 percent and CNN down 50 percent.
Traditional leftist newspapers are rethinking their editorial coverage. A week after Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, defended his position to withhold his paper’s endorsement of Vice President Harris, asserting that endorsements create the “perception of bias,” he congratulated Trump.
“We look forward to working with you and your administration on issues important to our customers, employees, communities, and country,” Bezos said.
Don’t hold your breath, Mr. President.
When he pulled back on the endorsement, however, there was a backlash among reporters and readers alike, resulting in the resignation of nearly one third of the paper’s editorial board and 250,000 readers cancelling subscriptions.
Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, appearing on Fox News Channel, detailed his plan to move his paper towards “the views of all.”
“We’ve conflated news and opinion,” he said, recognizing that opinion has worked its way into news reporting.
Editorially, “we need views from both sides, and my goal is to offer conservative perspectives.”
In a lengthy diatribe, “Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs,” New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat refers to Trump’s first term. “The victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed,”
Douthat viewed Trump’s presidency as a beak from a “normal” world of politics, and later saw opposition to his presidency with Joe Biden, writing “Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.”
Then, with Biden’s fade and Harris’s defeat he writes, “Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.”
Douthat concedes that his belief may sound a bit alarmist – “exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or authoritarian American future,” however, writes, “the new future is much more open and uncertain than that dark vision.”
He writes of the decline of the mainstream since the Internet, indicating that “there is no trusted mediating, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a mainstream of argument and opinion-shaping.”
Is it any wonder?
New York Times reporter Michael Gold couldn’t even write about Karoline Leavitt’s appointment as White House press secretary without attacking Trump being “hyper-focused on coverage himself, complaining both privately and publicly about newspaper headlines and television packages and castigating news outlets over unfavorable coverage.”
The left-leaning Atlantic is taking a kind of wait-and-see approach on Trump in a piece by Conor Friedersdorf in which he acknowledges Trump receiving three million more votes than Harris.
Recalling 2016, Friedersdorf wrote, “No one believes that a foreign nation was responsible for his victory … no one alleges illegality in this campaign,” therefore, “a 2016-style resistance to Trump is untenable.”
What he urges toward Trump is “normal political opposition, which is more likely to yield good civic results.”
It’s obvious, Trump notes coverage on television, newspapers, magazines and even podcasts. He will continue to refer to “certain networks” and “enemies,” who produce fake news.
An Ill-Conceived Scheme
Surely, you’ve heard how the Harris-Walz campaign is being accused by supporters of badly mismanaging $1 billion in campaign donations.
While there is no evidence, so far, to back up the rumors that she paid celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce a million dollars to appear. The campaign says the expenditures for theirs, and other appearances involved the cost of staging, lights, etc.
What is known is that she paid $5.4 million in donations to Latino and Black advocacy groups, according to campaign finance records reviewed by the Free Beacon, including $2 million the National Urban League, $150,000 to the Black Economic Alliance, and $150,000 to the Black Church PAC.
Of note was two payments of $250,000 to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, for an interview tailored to meet the narratives of her campaign, aired on MSNBC. So much for journalistic ethics.
Donors are demanding to know how Harris could have spent more than a billion dollars only to lose both the electoral and popular vote.
It didn’t pay off
“Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier,” according to Michael C. Bender, reporting on New York Times analysis.
As expected, President Elect Trump is wasting no time as his transition team seems to be working 24/7,
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
