The Mainstream News Media Continues to Prove President Trump Right About Them
Last year, I mentioned how the corporate legacy mainstream news media just continues to prove President Donald Trump right when he calls them "Fake News"(A term they coined, but was quickly turned against them) and "the enemy of the American people". But, at the same time, it's because we, the people, have allowed the news media to behave in such a irresponsible manner.
Recently, several hundred US newspapers published roughly the exact same editorial criticizing President Trump's continued attacks on the legacy news media, including my local newspapers, the Houma Courier and the Houma-Thibodaux Times a week later. Although, with the Times being a weekly paper published every Wednesday, it made their editorial a little more nuanced than some of the others, saying that while Trump's quarrel with the media is more with national news outlets like CNN and the New York Times, the rhetoric against the corporate legacy mainstream news media has trickled down to the local news outlets even if the local news is not owned by a multi-national media conglomerate like CNN(Time Warner), MSNBC(Comcast), ABC(Disney), and Fox News(News Corp) are.
A day after all those editorials, CNN and several other left-leaning news outlets tried to get the judge presiding over the Paul Manafort tax evasion trial to release the names and addresses of the jurors while they were in middle of deliberating the charges against Manafort.
Even though the judge rightfully denied the request(in part because the judge mentioned getting threats against him), I think that the request for the jurors' names and addresses(especially when the jury was not sequestered for the trial) played a bigger factor in getting Manafort convicted on 8 of the 18 charges against him. What CNN did was essentially jury tampering and I honestly think that Manafort could end up getting his conviction overturned on appeal based on that.
Last July, CNN got so butthurt over a tweet President Trump made mocking them(the clip from WrestleMania 23 where he attacked Vince McMahon with the CNN logo covering Vince's head) that they went after a Reddit user who allegedly created the altered gif and threatened to "doxx" the person if they didn't apologize to the network, even going so far as to hold it over their head for the rest of their life.
As I said then, CNN's actions just serve to make it more difficult for the corporate legacy news media to regain the trust of the people(and this isn't just going on in America). Especially when they behave in ways that cause the people to lose trust in CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and even Fox News in the first place. As I've pointed out, polls have shown that only 6% of the American people even trust the news media and that more people trust President Trump to tell the truth more than they do the news media.
When the people think that the President of the United States is more honest and trustworthy than the corporate legacy news media, that is not Donald Trump's fault, that's the legacy media's fault. And to a lesser extent, it's also ours.
Why do we perceive the corporate legacy news media as the enemy of the American people? In his book, "Do I Stand Alone?", Jesse Ventura pointed out several reasons why the corporate legacy mainstream news media acts so irresponsibly:
-The news media is obsessed with scandal and how to portray the ugliest sides of humanity. That just reporting on the news hasn't been enough for the news channels and the media conglomerates that own the station, it's about what will get the public's attention especially when they're competing against everyone, including entertainment medium that aren't direct competitors, for that attention.
-The news media is obsessed with conflict. They have to turn every story into a fight, acting like there's only two sides to every issue with no room for nuance.
-The news media chooses character assassination over focusing on issues. After all, they like tearing people down as much as they like building them up, possibly more so. They look for anything in a particular story that will generate the most outrage and ignore everything else including something that contradicts their narrative. They also have double standards about the opinions they push. Ventura used himself as an example since he was still governor of Minnesota at the time "Do I Stand Alone?" was published. If he did anything, the media would find anybody that had a negative view of him to counter him. But anytime someone said something negative about him, the media wouldn't bother to come to him for a chance to respond and counter potentially false statements. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
-The news media sometimes creates the news rather than just reporting on the news. And they'll even create a scandal even if there's none to be had. The media only reports on facts that either fit their narrative or throws gasoline on the fire. Or they'll make the facts fit their narrative by taking someone out of context either completely or partially.
-And the news media operates with little to no accountability for their actions.
I think another main reason why the legacy media has such a negative image with the people is because the mainstream news media always seems to attack everything we like. Whether it was television shows, comic books, movies, music, video games, pro wrestling, and even most contact sports like mixed martial arts and even football(both American football and soccer), the news media always seems to accentuate the negative aspects of everything to make everything look worse than they actually are. Also, it seems like most journalists are nothing more than political activists pretending to be journalists.
And it also doesn't help the legacy news media's case when it always treats a story like it's feeding a pig, constantly feeding that pig until it explodes, then the legacy media turns around and reports on the explosion, all the while acting like they had absolutely nothing to do with that pig exploding the way it did.
As I said two years ago in the weeks before the presidential election, the news media acts the way they do because we have allowed them to act that way for far too long. We have become a tabloid nation that cares more about gossip and scandal than we do about the actual issues. And this has been the case long before Donald Trump even thought about running for President of the United States, We would rather blame the news media for only reporting on gossip and scandal when we're just as responsible for their reporting since we respond more to muckraking and negative headlines that promote fear and hysteria than we do the actual issues and to headlines that show those fears to be unfounded. For example, the panic over the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 80's-early 90's, the Satanic panic in the 80's and 90's, the Red Scare in the 50's and 60's, and the pixel panic over fake "violent" video games from the early 90s through today.
We can blame the news media for being biased, but we all have our own personal biases, and we always tend to gravitate towards news that share our own viewpoints to confirm those biases.
The corporate legacy news media acts like any criticism President Trump and the people, whether they actually support Trump or not, have of them is an attack on the entire right of the freedom of the press. However, the freedom of the press is not as infinite as they'd like to think and have us believe. Look at what happened to Gawker when Hulk Hogan sued them for defamation and won. The same thing could very easily happen to CNN or MSNBC even with their billion dollar media conglomerates backing them.
And they don't like the fact that President Trump uses Twitter on a daily basis to tell everyone, not just his own base, everything on his mind. The media always wants to be the middle man and he essentially cuts them out of the deal unless he wants to speak to them directly(and even then, it's usually Fox News he talks to). And the legacy media, especially CNN, wants the people to be passive consumers who allow them to do the thinking(and even the talking) for us.
But, we have the freedom to not watch any news station if we don't like how they report the news. We can and should cancel our newspaper subscriptions and even our cable TV services and just get our news online. Like all capitalist ventures, the media conglomerates are all in it for the money regardless of any costs to our societies at large. When the National Enquirer has more credibility than the New York Times(especially when the latter hires Sarah Jeong, an anti-white racist, and defends that hiring) and TMZ has more credibility than CNN(especially when CNN host Chris Cuomo defends Antifa even when the far-left Communist group attacks journalists and not to mention CNN White House correspondent Jim Ascota's reckless and borderline treasonous behavior), that's not the fault of the National Enquirer or TMZ. It's not even our fault. It's the fault of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and even Fox News for behaving the way they do.
At the end of the day, we, the people, have more power than the legacy media does. If they want people to vote with their wallets against companies they don't like, we can do it to them.
Recently, several hundred US newspapers published roughly the exact same editorial criticizing President Trump's continued attacks on the legacy news media, including my local newspapers, the Houma Courier and the Houma-Thibodaux Times a week later. Although, with the Times being a weekly paper published every Wednesday, it made their editorial a little more nuanced than some of the others, saying that while Trump's quarrel with the media is more with national news outlets like CNN and the New York Times, the rhetoric against the corporate legacy mainstream news media has trickled down to the local news outlets even if the local news is not owned by a multi-national media conglomerate like CNN(Time Warner), MSNBC(Comcast), ABC(Disney), and Fox News(News Corp) are.
A day after all those editorials, CNN and several other left-leaning news outlets tried to get the judge presiding over the Paul Manafort tax evasion trial to release the names and addresses of the jurors while they were in middle of deliberating the charges against Manafort.
Even though the judge rightfully denied the request(in part because the judge mentioned getting threats against him), I think that the request for the jurors' names and addresses(especially when the jury was not sequestered for the trial) played a bigger factor in getting Manafort convicted on 8 of the 18 charges against him. What CNN did was essentially jury tampering and I honestly think that Manafort could end up getting his conviction overturned on appeal based on that.
Last July, CNN got so butthurt over a tweet President Trump made mocking them(the clip from WrestleMania 23 where he attacked Vince McMahon with the CNN logo covering Vince's head) that they went after a Reddit user who allegedly created the altered gif and threatened to "doxx" the person if they didn't apologize to the network, even going so far as to hold it over their head for the rest of their life.
As I said then, CNN's actions just serve to make it more difficult for the corporate legacy news media to regain the trust of the people(and this isn't just going on in America). Especially when they behave in ways that cause the people to lose trust in CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and even Fox News in the first place. As I've pointed out, polls have shown that only 6% of the American people even trust the news media and that more people trust President Trump to tell the truth more than they do the news media.
When the people think that the President of the United States is more honest and trustworthy than the corporate legacy news media, that is not Donald Trump's fault, that's the legacy media's fault. And to a lesser extent, it's also ours.
Why do we perceive the corporate legacy news media as the enemy of the American people? In his book, "Do I Stand Alone?", Jesse Ventura pointed out several reasons why the corporate legacy mainstream news media acts so irresponsibly:
-The news media is obsessed with scandal and how to portray the ugliest sides of humanity. That just reporting on the news hasn't been enough for the news channels and the media conglomerates that own the station, it's about what will get the public's attention especially when they're competing against everyone, including entertainment medium that aren't direct competitors, for that attention.
-The news media is obsessed with conflict. They have to turn every story into a fight, acting like there's only two sides to every issue with no room for nuance.
-The news media chooses character assassination over focusing on issues. After all, they like tearing people down as much as they like building them up, possibly more so. They look for anything in a particular story that will generate the most outrage and ignore everything else including something that contradicts their narrative. They also have double standards about the opinions they push. Ventura used himself as an example since he was still governor of Minnesota at the time "Do I Stand Alone?" was published. If he did anything, the media would find anybody that had a negative view of him to counter him. But anytime someone said something negative about him, the media wouldn't bother to come to him for a chance to respond and counter potentially false statements. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
-The news media sometimes creates the news rather than just reporting on the news. And they'll even create a scandal even if there's none to be had. The media only reports on facts that either fit their narrative or throws gasoline on the fire. Or they'll make the facts fit their narrative by taking someone out of context either completely or partially.
-And the news media operates with little to no accountability for their actions.
I think another main reason why the legacy media has such a negative image with the people is because the mainstream news media always seems to attack everything we like. Whether it was television shows, comic books, movies, music, video games, pro wrestling, and even most contact sports like mixed martial arts and even football(both American football and soccer), the news media always seems to accentuate the negative aspects of everything to make everything look worse than they actually are. Also, it seems like most journalists are nothing more than political activists pretending to be journalists.
And it also doesn't help the legacy news media's case when it always treats a story like it's feeding a pig, constantly feeding that pig until it explodes, then the legacy media turns around and reports on the explosion, all the while acting like they had absolutely nothing to do with that pig exploding the way it did.
As I said two years ago in the weeks before the presidential election, the news media acts the way they do because we have allowed them to act that way for far too long. We have become a tabloid nation that cares more about gossip and scandal than we do about the actual issues. And this has been the case long before Donald Trump even thought about running for President of the United States, We would rather blame the news media for only reporting on gossip and scandal when we're just as responsible for their reporting since we respond more to muckraking and negative headlines that promote fear and hysteria than we do the actual issues and to headlines that show those fears to be unfounded. For example, the panic over the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 80's-early 90's, the Satanic panic in the 80's and 90's, the Red Scare in the 50's and 60's, and the pixel panic over fake "violent" video games from the early 90s through today.
We can blame the news media for being biased, but we all have our own personal biases, and we always tend to gravitate towards news that share our own viewpoints to confirm those biases.
The corporate legacy news media acts like any criticism President Trump and the people, whether they actually support Trump or not, have of them is an attack on the entire right of the freedom of the press. However, the freedom of the press is not as infinite as they'd like to think and have us believe. Look at what happened to Gawker when Hulk Hogan sued them for defamation and won. The same thing could very easily happen to CNN or MSNBC even with their billion dollar media conglomerates backing them.
And they don't like the fact that President Trump uses Twitter on a daily basis to tell everyone, not just his own base, everything on his mind. The media always wants to be the middle man and he essentially cuts them out of the deal unless he wants to speak to them directly(and even then, it's usually Fox News he talks to). And the legacy media, especially CNN, wants the people to be passive consumers who allow them to do the thinking(and even the talking) for us.
But, we have the freedom to not watch any news station if we don't like how they report the news. We can and should cancel our newspaper subscriptions and even our cable TV services and just get our news online. Like all capitalist ventures, the media conglomerates are all in it for the money regardless of any costs to our societies at large. When the National Enquirer has more credibility than the New York Times(especially when the latter hires Sarah Jeong, an anti-white racist, and defends that hiring) and TMZ has more credibility than CNN(especially when CNN host Chris Cuomo defends Antifa even when the far-left Communist group attacks journalists and not to mention CNN White House correspondent Jim Ascota's reckless and borderline treasonous behavior), that's not the fault of the National Enquirer or TMZ. It's not even our fault. It's the fault of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and even Fox News for behaving the way they do.
At the end of the day, we, the people, have more power than the legacy media does. If they want people to vote with their wallets against companies they don't like, we can do it to them.