(and clean hankies too! ooo!!
Posted on 07/27/2016 5:30:39 AM PDT by randita
Media Have a ‘Cry Wolf’ Problem with Trump
Decades of smearing decent Republican candidates leaves them without credibility on Trump’s demagoguery.
By Jonah Goldberg — July 27, 2016
Dear Mainstream Media and Democrats: It’s your turn. Now that Donald Trump has been formally nominated, the formal responsibility to stop him passes from the Right to the Left, from Republicans to Democrats and the journalists who amplify their values.
You’re going to find it a very tough slog. And it’s your own damn fault.
During the primaries, the task of exposing the true nature of the Trump takeover fell disproportionately to a few conservative magazines, columnists, renegade radio hosts, and behind-the-scenes activists. We all failed. There will be plenty of time for recriminations and “we happy few” speeches later. (If you detect a note of bitterness on my part, I’m not being clear enough: I contain symphonies of bitterness.)
We failed in part because the mainstream media were having too good of a time to help. Last spring, Stop Trump operatives told me they brought damning stories to mainstream outlets. The response was usually: “We’re not interested in covering that — right now.”
By May, Trump had already received roughly $3 billion worth of free media, thanks to ratings-hungry TV networks. CBS chief Les Moonves summarized it well at an investor conference in February: Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Many in the media were so willing to put clicks and ratings before country because the conventional wisdom was that Trump would fade or implode eventually. Why not gawk at the spectacle? And if Trump did get the nomination, many journalists calculated, all the better. What fun it will be to watch Hillary Clinton destroy Trump and Trump destroy the GOP.
Only slowly have the media come around to the realization that Trump is an actual threat, but now it may be too late because they have a serious “cry wolf” problem. Millions of Americans firmly believe that journalists are water carriers for the Democrats and will tune out much of what they have to say about Trump now that he’s the nominee.
You can start the timeline as far back as the World War II era. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt told the country that if Republicans were returned to power, “even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.” The press nodded along.
In 1964, CBS News’s Daniel Schorr claimed that Barry Goldwater’s planned post-convention vacation in Europe was really an effort to coordinate with “right-wing Germans” in “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.”
In recent years, as the distinctions between news and opinion, analysis and advocacy, reporting and click-baiting has blurred, the problem has only gotten worse.
Every election cycle, the GOP nominee is smeared as a racist by the Democrats or the press — or both. Representative John Lewis of Georgia trades in a bit more of his hard-earned moral authority each time he insinuates that the GOP nominee is like George Wallace or wants to bring back Jim Crow, and political columnists relinquish a bit more of their claim to objectivity each time they let his comments pass without condemnation or criticism.
George W. Bush revived for the Left the paranoid style in American politics, and if you google “John McCain, racist, 2008” you’ll see he was lazily demonized too.
In 2012, pundits said Paul Ryan wanted to throw old ladies over cliffs because he wanted to reform Social Security. When Mitt Romney spoke to the NAACP, the response from many in the media was, per usual, “Racist!” (It’s ironic that many of the notable Republicans rebuking Trump this year are the ones pundits were only too happy to paint as racist not long ago.)
I have no doubt many journalists would defend their smears and professional failures, but that doesn’t change the fact that many Americans outside the mainstream media/Democratic bubble find it all indefensible. More important, they find it all ignorable — because the race card and the demagogue card have been played and replayed so often they’re little more than scraps of lint.
Already, editorial boards are preparing their indictments of what they believe to be Donald Trump’s incompetence, bigotry, and authoritarianism. Trump operatives will undoubtedly respond: “That’s what they always say about Republicans.” And they’ll be right.
— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review.
He is correct in that he is full of it.
Jonah can go to hell. Note they have gone to the press with “damning stories” that are being held back until later.
So obeying our laws is now fascism? What a bunch of loons.
Actually, Baby Jonah sold Dove Bars on the streets of Manhattan before becoming world famous. True!
He can’t compete with his mother’s acerbic morning comments on her own website. And he might try bathing before he appears on tv.
Jonah, you simp, there's NOTHING that you could tell me about None - zero - of the other candidates convinced me that they were up to the task. So go sit in the corner and drink another gibson - the rest of us have work to do!
Johnah’s output at NR lately looks like essays hastily written the night before they are due in class.
Wow, my post got garbled!
Jonah, you simp, there’s NOTHING that you could tell me about Trump that I don’t already know. None - zero - of the other candidates convinced me that they were up to the task
My problem with him as a writer was that he always started off with an irrelevant paragraph and took another one or two to get to his real point. Thereafter he was very good. Now he achieves total, vindictive psychosis as soon as “TRUMP”, the magic word, is spoken or even whispered.
Jonah the Gay Blade!
I don’t know why people here think he is a particularly good writer. I guess it’s the same folks that think PJ O’Rourke and Dave Barry are funny. Now, I’ll hear from the O’Rourke fans, God help me.
PJ O’Rourke and Dave Barry have never been suited for anything more than bird cage liner in my household.
And I don’t even have any parakeets. The last one was reading the New York Times, and well: you get the picture.
Not pretty. ;)
TTYL! Back later on!
“Get over yourself, Jonah. You, in your own way, were just as bad as the MSM you decry.”
He still thinks of himself as ‘special’ and somehow exempt.
“Millions of Americans firmly believe that journalists are water carriers for the Democrats”
Honest to God! I marvel at their consuming hatred for all things Trump. You’d think they eat/sleep/breath the one thing they claim to hate - him and his fellow travelers are laughable.
Noticed on twitter today that the idiot Ben Howe was joking about Chapman (the would be Reagan assassin) being freed. Howe’s pathetic attempt at a joke was that Trump already killed Reagan.
These guys are slurping up some serious brain altering crap.
I believe he’s the poster boy for the death of conservatism. Anyone, I mean anyone who supports TPP, open borders, Obamacare and the continuing resolutions passed to fund our country could NEVER be conservative. It’s a myth. Over. Romney, Ryan, Goldberg, Levin, Beck, Boehner, McConnell, all of them represent something other than conservatism. It’s veiled Globalism.
He proves to us that he doesn’t care about any of the conservative issues he writes about. He would rather see Hillary destroy the country then support Trump for president. I guess a eunuch like Jonas is scared of a straight talking man like Trump. He’s used to the mealy mouth talk from the country club cowards.
One of the more surprising things about the primaries was much time “Conservatives” spent spreading obvious media lies about Trump. You’d think after being smeared by the media for so many years they would have used better judgement.
National RINOreview.
No thanks. They are known NeverTrumpers. Should be banned from being posted, here, since that is frowned upon.
Jonah, Mark Levin, Bill Kristol, Hugh Hewitt, et al. DON’T CARE what Hillary will do. They will continue to be “conservative” pundits and make money selling their books, magazines and radio shows in which they continue to whine and complain toothlessly and uselessly about Hillary and the liberals (as they have made a beautiful dollar doing over the past 30+ years). Most of us pretty much already knew this was their shtick, but Donald Trump exposed them once and for all.
Shall I be blunt?
He was ok with that because he knew you would not succeed.
They have allowed, small rebellions, harmless uprisings and a few crumbs of success because they knew that down the line you would be crushed.
Trump is not business as usual. And they are very scared that he is going to go along with their plan. Worse that he might pull said plan out of the dark and into the light.
He just gave a press conference. It was covered for free !!
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