To someone who has spent most of his career in the news business, it’s distressing to confront the current state of the media. Rather than a source of information and varied opinion, the media increasingly act not so such as disseminators of information but as a privileged and separate caste, determined to shape opinion to a certain set of conclusions.
When you pick up a great newspaper like the New York Times, it is sometimes shocking how openly partisan the coverage tends to be. For example, when President Donald Trump unveiled his new tax plan, the headline was not about the proposal per se, but rather how it would serve the wealthy. This may indeed be the case, but such an approach would traditionally be the role of the editorial pages — not the Page 1 headline writers.
This approach oddly actually plays exactly into the president’s hands at a time when, according to a September Gallup poll, confidence in the media stands at a historic low of 32 percent, down from 55 percent in 1999. Even if they don’t like Trump, most Americans are turned off by the relentless negativity.
The unique challenge of Trump
Alienating customers is not good business, especially for an industry that has seen close to 40 percent of its jobs disappear over the past 20 years. Some of the problems, of course, reflect other issues, most notably the rise of online media and the fact that barely 5 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 get their news from print newspapers. Cable and network news are not doing much better; their audience, notes a March 2014 Pew Research Center report, is now smaller than it was in 2007.
The public’s growing disdain allows Trump to give the media a “big, fat, failing grade” as one of his essential talking points. His no-show at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner plays well with a large part of the population that feels alienated from the mainstream media.
Conservatives have long railed against media bias. But under Ronald Reagan, media experts like Michael Deaver and Pete Hannaford flanked the press by using television and radio to go “over their heads.” The Trump approach, spurred by bully-in-chief Steve Bannon, decries the media as “enemies of the people,” an approach more Stalinesque than Reaganesque.
Trump’s often dubious relationship with the facts remains fair game, but does not excuse the media becoming so obvious and willing a tool of progressive Democrats. Under President Obama, the media simply ignored, or buried, stories such as the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservatives, the expulsion of 2 million immigrants, Obama’s repeated foreign policy failures or his blatant misdirection over health care.
In contrast, some issues, like transgender issues, anything relating to immigration, particularly undocumented aliens, or climate change, are covered with a one-sided stridency characteristic of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As a cub reporter, I was told by my editor at the Washington Post, “Nobody gives a crap about your opinion,” and we were obliged to look for dissenting opinions. Informing the public was our job, leaving analysis and opinion to the pundits on the inside pages.
Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.
Photo: Steve Jurvetson [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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Fair and Balanced
"For example, when President Donald Trump unveiled his new tax plan, the headline was not about the proposal per se, but rather how it would serve the wealthy. This may indeed be the case, but such an approach would traditionally be the role of the editorial pages — not the Page 1 headline writers."
The lopsided distribution of Trump's tax plan is something that can be empirically determined with math. Why should that be relegated to the opinion pages? So someone who counted the beans can be placed across the page from a Trump surrogate saying "Nuh uh, it doesn't" and their statements can be treated as equally valid?
This kind of fair-and-balanced, post-factual, don't-hurt-their-feelings hedging is what's really killing journalism, not the fact that newspapers are reporting mean things about Trump and his claims that mostly happen to be objectively true.