For the last year or so the mainstream media (MSM) resounded with a common theme – Donald Trump will bring ruin to our great democracy but don’t worry, there’s no way he can possibly win. Reality has shown that those pundits were reporting their wish far more than truth.
Now that President-Elect Trump is soon to be President Trump, will the MSM change its tune? A look at reporting during the last few election cycles and how the media fashioned its narrative shows that to be highly unlikely.
Consider some of the stories that followed in the days just after Trump’s historic win:
- An American Tragedy (The New Yorker) – “The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy.”
- I Cried When I Told My Daughters Donald Trump Will Be President. (Time Magazine) – “Hey, girls,” I finally managed. “So, Donald Trump will be our next President.” The tears started coming… “I feel bad for the black people, mommy,” said one. “Yeah, and for the poor people,” the other said.
- 7 Terrifying Changes Women Can Expect To Face Under President Trump (Redbook) – “Well-it happened. Donald Trump is our next president. Now that the votes have been tallied, the concession speech delivered, and the tears have been cried (#truth), it’s time to think about what a Trump presidency will look like for us nasty women.”
- Trump Goes After Immigrants, Government Workers, The Environment, And Gay Couples — That’s Day One (Daily Kos)
- White Won (Slate) – “Fifty years after the black freedom movement forced the United States to honor its ideals, at least on paper, it’s clear this was premature. Like clockwork, white Americans embraced a man who promised a kind of supremacy. We haven’t left our long cycle of progress and backlash. We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till.”
- How the media made this monster, normalizing Donald Trump and demonizing Hillary Clinton, and it’s not over (Salon) – “But if we thought media outlets had ‘normalized’ Trump before, it was nothing compared with what’s happening now. Media representatives assume that Donald Trump has ‘pivoted,’ which is shorthand for their ongoing assumption that at some point Trump would drop the cretinous imbecile act he uses to entertain the rubes and morph into the intelligent, thoughtful businessman he really is. This anticipation of the pivot was a regular feature of the campaign which obviously never actually happened — or ever will. Trump is Trump.”It would be a mistake to think this represents the fringe of what those in New York and Hollywood think of Donald Trump and those who made him president.
The main stream media created the narrative that Hillary Clinton would be the inevitable winner of the election with more than one commentator predicting a landslide of epic proportions. The networks’ supposed trustworthy polls and added predictions that Democrats would also end up with control of the U.S. Senate could not have been more wrong. The reality is that Republicans now control the Presidency and both houses Congress for the first time since 1928.
Donald Trump made a distrust of the media one of the main themes of his campaign and that resonated with voters. Pew Research shows that just two in ten Americans (22%) trust their local news sources and less than that trust most national news organizations.
Only about two-in-ten Americans (22%) trust the information they get from local news organizations a lot, whether online or offline, and 18% say the same of national organizations, slightly higher than the 14% who say this of the information they get from their friends and family. While the portion saying they have a lot of trust in each group is low, large majorities have at least some trust.
All the cable news networks except FOX lost viewers after the election (FOX gained more than CNN and MSNBC combined). Still trying to explain its bias and misreading of the vast majority of America, it is likely that the mainstream media will double down on its treatment of our new President.
Remember – you couldn’t trust them then and you can’t trust them now.
~ Conservative Zone
