One of the biggest disappointments of this election season has to be the final unraveling of the mainstream media. As the days pass and the smoke clears a bit after the shocking events, it is hard to grapple with the magnitude of their collapse.
It’s true that its demise has been many years in the making, but what we just witnessed was stunning.
Some in the press have shown a bit of introspection, after reality set in that their political campaign (more on that later) was over and they had lost. But sadly, the soul-searching itself is part of the script. The “we live in a liberal bubble” explanation worked for a while, but it is wholly inadequate to explain 2016.
I hesitate to say it, but for practical purposes, the mainstream media is dead.
It’s dead because it cannot be trusted. In 2016, we’ve discovered, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the mainstream media colludes with the Democratic Party to advance the careers of liberal politicians. We know for a fact that it colluded to elect Hillary Clinton.
This is more than merely siding with liberal policies or demanding in your official manual that pro-lifers be called “anti-abortion.” That’s plain old liberal bias, and we’re all accustomed to dealing with it. However, this goes well beyond that.
The “liberal bubble” was Bernard Goldberg’s thesis in his best-selling book Bias, and it made a lot of sense then, but it turns out that explanation falls way short. The bubble is real, and it helps explain many aspects of what ails newsrooms all over the country, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
The mainstream media provides both cover and ammunition for the Democratic Party, while hiding behind the misappropriated title of “journalists.”
But you can’t call yourself “the press” when you give the questions of a presidential debate to one candidate. You can’t pretend impartiality any longer when you are coordinating with the Democratic National Committee on the questions you need to ask of their opponents.
Today’s press ignores or holds on to information for maximum political impact.
And that’s just the English-speaking media. In the case of the Spanish-speaking media, it was worse. The chairman of Univision, who has one of the largest Spanish-language news broadcast in the nation, was acting as an advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign, urging them to do more against Trump’s comments on Latinos.
Then there was the vitriol from Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, who actually complained there was not enough bias against Donald Trump from the mainstream media.
Sadly, the after-election freakout continues in the same way. CNN’s coverage of the anti-Trump protests included this protestor using the “Hillary got more votes” talking point of the left that got a lot of play on social media. I saw it several times on Twitter and Facebook.
Then the day after I saw the initial clip, I watched the full version posted by Sharyl Attkisson, in which Don Lemon reveals that the man being interviewed is a CNN camera man. Seriously! Take a look at it yourself:
So no, the media is not going to change. Forget about that.
Because nothing has changed. The same Democratic operatives who worked the newsrooms yesterday continue their work today. They’ll just have to try harder next time. Be subtler or simply not get caught. They almost won, after all.
We just have to adapt to this new “pressless” world. Sure, there are some good reporters who try to do a good job, but it is so hard to decipher it all, it is fair to say most people will not go to the trouble.
It’s no wonder a new Media Research Center/YouGov poll found that, “7 in 10 (69%) voters do not believe the news media are honest and truthful.” And, “97% of voters said they did not let the media’s bias influence their vote.”
The jig is up. The media is dead. And it’ll take a miracle to resurrect it.
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This op-ed was featured in CNS News.
You can follow Mario no Twitter @legalblurbblog.