Did the press get a wake-up call at the Correspondents’ Dinner?
Political changer Sasha Stone writes:
Cole Allen took the press at their word, which is why he couldn’t understand how they could have dinner with a “rapist, traitor, and pedophile.” He has a point. After all, why would they if they really meant everything they’ve been telling us for ten years?
Had he been better at breaching security — if he’d had a better weapon that could fire multiple rounds, there is a good chance members of the press could have been mowed down too …
The press didn’t seem to get it. None of them even took a pause, except to blame Trump, …
The press, however, should have better discernment. If they could just tell the truth for once, or at least try to correct the record, maybe we wouldn’t be here now, where yet another assassin felt he had no other choice but to do the world a favor by killing Hitler.
All of that is true. But I don’t think it matters, because today’s press is uninterested in telling anything but the partisan story. They are propagandists first and foremost. That’s why most of them got into “journalism” in the first place – not to tell the truth wherever it might lead them, but to further the left’s message of the left, a left in which most of them truly believe. They are in it for the perks too, of course, and the power. But they are also in it for the virtue.
Nor do they want to stop the Cole Allens of the world, except when the Cole Allens threaten the safety of the members of the press themselves. The foiled attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner was highly unusual in that regard. The press was not the target, but they would have been the collateral damage had Allen been better at his chosen task. Blaming Trump rather than themselves is a no-brainer for the press, because to blame themselves would take a much higher level of self-awareness and devotion to truth than they can muster at this point.
The FNM are running with the Supreme Court just brought back the Jim Crow era narrative right now.
It’s disgraceful actually. I wonder if they have thought it all through. What do they think the outcome will be if they continue feeding the general public misinformation and lies.
Something you can pin on your cubicle wall.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eb49b518908a2c52fdda3de12ad2d923d842c8ea4099816ef5efc77126f53796.jpg
If a famous or name brand reporter or journalist were to (hypothetically) be assassinated or inadvertently killed, it would raise their work product and their presumed virtue to even higher levels than they receive now.
Better to find ways to laugh at them and ridicule them. Sometimes Trump calls them out, but it is usually a blunder buss shot rather than a plunge with a rapier. Rubio and Vance and a few others are also pretty good at warding off the worst reporter’s “coverage” or “queries”, but even these better administration stalwarts are not consistently subtle in their cruelty and counter jesting vs. just being firm in their rejection, with minimal name calling, etc.
I suppose that is a skill that has to be worked on and planned for, and possibly different responses are required for different interlocutors. Off the top of my head I think maybe Ben Shapiro can think rapidly enough on his feet. Any others?
@ R2L > “Any others?”
Mark Steyn, in the class of pundits.
The current Senator John Kennedy.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is pretty deft with a phrase, and absolutely fearless AFAICT.
The other ready wits I remember are mostly deceased: Franklin, Twain, Lincoln, Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Churchill, Reagan.
Dorothy Parker.
Most stand-up comics.
Restricting the field to political figures really narrows it down, though.
“…today’s press is uninterested in telling anything but the partisan story. They are propagandists first and foremost.”
That…and that alone is all one needs to know.
And that is but one of the reasons I don’t see a clean exit ramp from where we’re headed. The one I see is paved in bloody retribution…Makes me sad really.
A quotation from me, way back in the early eighties:
“The only good reporter is a dead reporter”.
The newspaper editor to whom that was addressed was visibly stunned and taken aback.
Would expect that the attendees who actually, though briefly, thought they might get shot
,may have had their eyes opened a bit.
Can’t find who said it, but, having read Allen’s manifesto, he said Allen believed all the stuff the democrats claim they never said.
— neo
And they always have been.
Throughout the history of the industry, that’s been true. Two things drive coverage: ideology and money. There are a lot of details built into ‘ideology’ and ‘money’, and the ratio varies with time and place. But it’s always been so.
The very nature of the business makes it very difficult for anything else to be so. Why become a reporter in the first place? The pay isn’t usually so hot, except for a handful of biggest names. I can really only think of two likely motives (other than chancing into it somehow, which happens in all fields sometimes): curiosity and ideology.
I could imagine someone driven by a strong desire to know becoming a reporter, and that probably happens sometimes. But a Romantic desire to ‘right wrongs and speak truth to power’, even if sincere (usually that desire is a cloak for one’s own self interest somehow) is ideology. The problem with the ‘crusading reporter’ meme is that the Platonic ideal of a reporter should be indifferent to what he covers, other than a desire to cover it truthfully. But that doesn’t fit human nature.
Rush Limbaugh and Walter Cronkite were both partisan ideologues doing news and analysis. The difference was that Limbaugh was pretty open about it and Cronkite pretended to objective neutrality.
The money side is also inescapable. News is a business, and ideology alone doesn’t keep the lights on, the printing presses spinning, the TV cameras on, or the web servers paid for. The only way to get money with news is to sell it, which makes the audience drive the news, or sell the audience to advertisers, which splits the drive between audience and advertiser.
This was reflected in the infamous incident where the NYT had to apologize from running an op ed by Tom Cotton. The real reason they had to back down and apologize was that their business model is now at least as much subscriber based as ad based. Their subscribers don’t want to hear from Tom Cotton, that’s not what they are paying for. They are paying to hear: ‘the walls are closing in on Trump’. And the audience is always by definition right when the audience pays the bills.
Objective coverage? Never happened, never will.
— fullmoon
Why would it? Wouldn’t it be closer to reality (as they see it) to say: ‘Look what Trump and the conservatives have done to the country and caused!’
The thing about press coverage is that while it is never objective, it is quite often at least semi-honest. That is, they really do hate who they hate, and they really do believe what they are selling is justified and real. You’ll sometimes hear reporters complain about how money interests compromise their coverage, but what they always mean is that it keeps them from presenting their own beliefs as facts. (That’s true on the Right as well, just to a lesser degree.)
Emotionally, the elite class that includes most of the professional journalists identifies with a world-wide identity, with capital-P Progress toward the one world vision of John Lennon’s Imagine and the old Coke commercials I keep harping on. The detest the nationalists and sincere religious believers and everyone they think are sabotaging the Dream.
Cole won’t be the problem, in their view. Oh, they consider that they might get caught in the crossfire a problem, sure. But their solution to that is remove what they see as the real source of all the trouble: Trump and his low-IQ idiot supporters.
We saw the same effect after 911. As long as they felt personally violated/endangered in New York City, they were OK with some action to deal with the proximate problem of Islamist violence. But they always saw America and Israel and the West as the real villains driving all of it, and as soon as they felt personally safe they immediately sided with the Islamists.
All the way back to the 1970s and 1980s, yeah, the press would sometimes admit that the USSR was messed up and dangerous, but they always analyzed it from the POV of ‘look how the West is forcing Russia to behave!’ Thus when Reagan started pushing back against the Soviets they insisted that he was the aggressor, because that vision isn’t John Lennon’s Imagine.
The educated elite class of the West hates their own civilization and heritage. The roots of that hate go back well over a century. Many people have trouble accepting that reality, but it is reality.
HC68 and John Guilfoyle—
Too true.
I think Glenn Reynolds’s at Instapundit started this meme during the Joe Brib’em years: we have the worst Ruling Class ever.
This cannot be said enough. WORST EVER.
But — one wonders — is that enough for a War Cry?
It’s a no brainer because they have no brains.