Posted on 12/21/2016 6:44:22 AM PST by dirtboy
Journalism has never been better, thanks to these last few decades of disruption. So why does it seem to matter so little? Reflections on the media in the age of Trump.
For the last two decades, the rules of political reporting have been blown up. And I’ve cheered at every step along the way. Not for me the mourning over the dismantling of the old order, all those lamentations about the lost golden era of print newspapers thudding on doorsteps and the sage evening news anchors reporting back to the nation on their White House briefings. Because, let’s face it: too much of Washington journalism in the celebrated good old days was an old boys’ club, and so was politics—they were smug, insular, often narrow-minded, and invariably convinced of their own rightness.
The truth is that coverage of American politics, and the capital that revolves around it, is in many ways much better now than ever before—faster, sharper, and far more sophisticated. There are great new digital news organizations for politics and policy obsessives, political science wonks, and national security geeks.
Today’s beat reporters on Capitol Hill are as a rule doing a far better job than I did when I was a rookie there two decades ago, and we get more reporting and insight live from the campaign trail in a day than we used to get in a month, thanks to Google and Facebook, livestreaming and Big Data, and all the rest. Access to information—by, for, and about the government and those who aspire to run it—is dazzling and on a scale wholly unimaginable when Donald Trump was hawking his Art of the Deal in 1987. And we have millions of readers for our work now, not merely a hyper-elite few thousand.
The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
Right. Just like today.
It's only better if you rate it on the percentage of anti-GOP or anti-Trump stories as related to ANYTHING that could be construed as "positive".
[Journalism has never been better, thanks to these last few decades of disruption.]
LOL
Tellingly, a few days after the election, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Tellingly, a few days after the election, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
What a ridiculous statement. Very seldom, if ever, did anyone from the leftist media fact check Hillary Clinton.
So the primary purveyor of Fake News are whining because most Americans now know they are fake new.
So much winning...
Talk about smug, insular, narrow-minded, and invariably convinced of her own rightness. Sheesh.
They were all afraid they would lose their "access" when she was crowned President.
I like the fact that the writer is pretty much openly admitting that she and her cohorts were not trying to assure fair and balanced coverage of the candidates, but were instead trying to keep Donald Trump from being elected.
Post truth America has been around since 1993.
Elections have come and come since then.
Sounds to me like just another way of saying: "Journalism is the same sack of tendentious, partisan, dishonest crap it has always been."
It was so blatant...that’s what helped elect Trump
FAKE news ALERT!
Propaganda has never been more putrid/polarizing.
At the end of the day journalists (especially editors and media owners) are censors. Out of the millions of stories around the world that could be covered they choose a select few and choose to ignore the rest. Every bias they have influences _that_ critical decision.
Then when you add the reporters determination to give their stupid and uninformed opinions as part of the story you have useless garbage.
That has been getting worse, not better.
“Today’s beat reporters on Capitol Hill are as a rule doing a far better job than I did”
LOL, talk about a self indictment!
What has changed?
The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
What the reporter does not recognize, or at least, fails to note, is that we have returned to partisan journalism. It was what journalism consisted of for the first half of our existence.
In partisan journalism, the media openly have a point of view, and you know it. That is where we are today. It is juts that the establishment media do not want to admit that their view is partisan, even though it has become obvious.
It is easy to understand why. When the establishment media claim “objectivity” they could use their voice to shape the narrative for the entire nation. They had enormous power, more than the politicians. The establishment media no longer have that ability.
An era of partisan media is much healthier.
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