Time To Let Go
Ok. Not that it means all that much but I have decided that it is OK for the press to let go of their hatred for Donald Trump. There, it’s done.
I have gone from reading several newspapers daily, watching CNN and Fox, occasionally reading those annoying emails from news sources no one has ever heard of, to reading the NYPost and my local version of The Patch.
All because I do not believe that the media in this country is fair and unbiased. Doesn’t matter the source, you are hearing a slanted version of the news and it still somehow comes back to Donald Trump.
Why? It’s simple, ratings are better with Trump. Circulations are better when Donald Trump being ridiculed or validated. It’s this fascination that I am giving every media outlet the right to cast aside. Cover the real stories and let sleeping dogs lie I say.
Yet, taking in all different sources of information it is still very clear to me: The Liberal press has not let go of its disdain for former President Donald Trump. The right is equally responsible for its love for all things Trumpian.
Enough already.
I bring this all up because as I opened up Dave Leonhardt’s column from The Morning (A NYTimes feature I subscribe to) he somewhat accurately explains the dichotomy of autocracy vs democracy and it didn’t take him but two paragraphs before he brought up Donald Trump and some nonsense about Trumps followers trying to turn a democratic election into something different. Enough is enough.
Let me stop right there. While I do not believe that the “rigged” election illegally put Joe Biden in office, I do believe that there was some shenanigans. Just like every election we have ever held in this country. It is 50 states trying to watch over countless communities that are responsible for the election results. You have to be naive’ to think that someone isn’t dropping more ballots or ripping up a few here and there. However, at the end of the day, Donald Trump lost by over seven million votes. Not a landslide but certainly not “Too close to call”. Whatever challenges the Republicans made were all defeated. Biden won. Enough already with even bothering to bring that up. The Clinton campaign subverted an entire presidency because they believed there was election medalling by the Russians. Yet, they never found any evidence of it. However, that attempt to destroy a presidency was ok. The media played that one up pretty good and at the end of the day, they had egg on their faces and never apologized.
The point of all of this is simple. The media, both sides, needs to get back to reporting the news. Trying to blame the Trump administration today for policies of four years ago is getting old quick. Whatever successes or failures the Biden administration has will be on them.
If anyone wonders why ratings are down for all news outlets overall, the answer is obvious. Liberal outlets are trying to connect anything they can to Donald Trump and it just really isn’t working anymore. He isn’t President. The conservative media is lost as well, trying build a battle where there really isn’t one and they don’t have Trump to defend anymore as well. They are all lost it seems.
The scary thing about all of this is that while ratings and sales mean a lot to media outlets, the bottomline is that they all belong to bigger media entities that are very profitable. They (not that it is sustainable model) can withstand shrinking revenue for a short period of time, while they retrench and limit coverage and keep going.
The motherships like the power of the news outlets, don’t fool yourselves. To address policy on a news outlet is the ultimate power move. Corporate parents like being asked to sit at the table more than they like the success of the next Dancing with the Voice Avatar show their minions have created. News divisions rarely are profitable but it isn’t profits that matter here, it’s a continued voice in the discourse of policy and practice.
This isn’t anything new however, networks and newspapers have always held an important role in policy and practice. Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow, Peter Jennings, John Chancellor and the list goes on. While they may have been partisan to one side or the other, that fact rarely showed up in their reporting. The networks clearly ran their own ships and up until the late 60’s and early 70’s generally stayed out of the political fray until Richard Nixon changed all of that.
Sorry for shooting off in different directions here but I think my point is pretty clear, it’s time to let the media free itself from the shackles of all things Trump and just move on. If they don’t get the message that people are just tired of hearing broadcasters somehow weave a story around some Trump issue, the ratings and the lost circulation surely will remind them.