Our media have a problem: they are essentially incapable of covering Donald Trump with anything less than full-on deranged hysteria.Indeed. Payne goes on to cite the various eyewitness accounts from both sides as well as the video documenting exactly what has been claimed, there were two groups, international socialists and national socialists, both creating mayhem and exacting violence on each other.
I do not say this as an excess of rhetoric or op-ed theatrics. It is a very real, very pressing problem, only getting worse, and it poses a significant danger to the social fabric of the United States. Twenty-first century American media has the ability to shape our discourse and shift our public consciousness, and it is abusing that power in the worst ways possible. This is likely a bigger problem than any of us realizes.
The last 48 hours provided a crystal-clear example of the genuinely dangerous course upon which the media have set themselves. At Trump Tower on Tuesday, President Trump held a press conference that was initially supposed to be about infrastructure but quickly went off-script and became about the Charlottesville neo-Nazi madness.
By itself this is nothing new: Trump regularly goes off-script, if it can even be said that he has a script. But the media behavior in the wake of this conference was arguably something new, a sort of grotesque watermark of the media’s coverage of the Trump administration thus far.
The furor surrounding the press conference stemmed largely from one particular line Trump delivered. When one reporter asked about his claim that there had been “hatred [and] violence on both sides,” Trump replied: “Well I do think there’s blame. Yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides.”
Media Immediately Jets Into Astral Orbit
With that unremarkable assertion, the media were off. “HE STILL BLAMES BOTH SIDES,” CNN blared in enormous font on its front page. In a headline, The New York Times blared that Trump “again blames ‘both sides.” So did the Chicago Tribune. So did NBC News. So did U.S. News and World Report (calling it “an insane press conference” to boot).
So did NPR. So did CBS News. So did the Washington Post. So did the Wall Street Journal. So did Time. So did MSNBC. So did USA Today. NBC News later wondered: “Has Trump Lost His Moral Authority for Good?” CNN continued with the massive headlines, calling Trump’s press conference “a meltdown for the ages,” and declaring: “Trump is who we feared he was.” Vox claimed Trump “is offering comfort to racists and extremists.”
The unambiguous implication of this media firestorm is obvious: we are supposed to see it as outrageous at best and morally abhorrent at worst that Trump would claim that “there is blame on both sides.” The thing is, Trump was telling the truth. There is blame on both sides. And we have eyewitness descriptions and photograph evidence to back it up.
Truth Is Truth, People
Trump appears to separate the generalized violence of that Saturday afternoon from the vehicular homicide a white nationalist perpetrated on Charlottesville’s mall near the end of the whole affair. In the press conference, Trump stated in no uncertain terms: “The driver of the car is a murderer. What he did was a horrible, inexcusable thing.”
It is, rather, the periodic violence that occurred throughout Charlottesville’s downtown area to which Trump was apparently referring. And he’s right: both sides committed violence on that day.
Americans of the great Age of Enlightenment culture see two totalitarian groups of thugs battling one another. They are committing crimes of violence and property and should both be arrested, charged with those crimes, and with due process, presumption of innocence and trial by jury, held accountable for their actions based on evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Americans want rule of law and equality before the law.
Our politicians and media instead see a stick to wield for political or ideological purposes. They want to win political points rather than acknowledging reality. This disengagement from reality, and indeed active denial of reality, is perplexing to mainstream Americans and almost appears to be a psychological condition. Hysteria is not an inaccurate description.
How can the mainstream media defend their position when, with internet and social media, Americans have ready access to virtually the same information as reporters and can see just how much of an ideological/political spin media is putting on events? How can the governor of Virginia stand up before reporters and, unquestioned, assert that police were outgunned and that the alt-right had stashes of weapons around the city, before being almost immediately called to task by the Sheriff's Department and the ACLU? The police were not outgunned. There were no weapons stashes.
Loss of life, injuries and property destruction were three elements of the tragedy of Charlottesville. Another is the failure of the mainstream media to report the news accurately and indeed being seen to be reporting the news in a partisan fashion.
And this isn't an issue of being apologists for national socialists. I think everyone with a functioning mind wants the law enforced on everyone equally and they want the news media to report events factually. By trying to convert a violent confrontation between thuggish totalitarians into an argument trying to bless one side and condemn the other, the media miss the main point and end up allying themselves with the very evil they rail against - coercive, thuggish totalitarian critical theorists trying to condemn based on their own racial, religious, and ideological biases. The problem for them is even worse when you consider the postmodernist critical theory ideology is so abhorrent to age of enlightenment culture, which is the well-spring of American culture.
Americans want justice, not social justice, social justice being another term for totalitarian overreach and mob rule.
We are clearly in a deep and constant war between our media and the duly elected leader chosen by the American people. This cannot end well for anyone, least of all the media.
UPDATE: Well, that's interesting. As a measure of the gap between the media and the public, here are the results from an NPR/Marist poll from the past week. MSM seems to be overwhelmingly against statues from the past (Confederate or otherwise) and Trump seems to be saying leave public statues alone (unless removed through the normal governmental process). Apparently the public is with Trump with 66% saying Confederate statues should stay. Even a plurality of 44% of African-Americans say let the past remain; only 40% would want such statues removed.
There is only one demographic for whom removal of Confederate statues is deemed appropriate. Only those who identify as Very Liberal or as Strong Democrats actually have a majority supporting statue removal (in both cases 57% of those self-identifying as Very Liberal or Strong Democrat want statues removed - certainly a majority in that demographic but not an overwhelming majority).
This is not about the relative merits of any argument, political, moral or otherwise. This is about how out-of-synch the MSM is with the American public.
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