Replies

The Mainstream Media has decided to downplay or avoid the leaks because it would help Trump whom they have decided to despise.

"The Mainstream Media” chuckles every time it is called "The Mainstream Media.” Granted that movies and fictional TV dramas are often problematic, nobody is ever gonna do anything about them because they are just - storytelling. And if you assay to do anything at all to control them you are a loose cannon w/ respect to the First Amendment. The logical target of your complaint - and you do have serous grounds for complaint - is wire service journalism. Attacking journalism, you at least have the basis of accusing it of false advertising as to completeness, veracity and objectivity. Why “wire service” journalism particularly? Because wire services are what unite what you call "The Mainstream Media” into a single entity.
The Associated Press is the ringleader, but all wire services have the homogenizing effect on journalism of which I complain. That is inherently true because any wire service is a continuous virtual meeting among its member organizations. As Adam Smith put it,
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
By uniting and homogenizing journalism, wire services give journalists (monopoly) power. What do you do when you have power? You do what you wanna. What do journalists want to do? Criticize, second guess, attract attention with sensational stories. How do they do it? By negativity (If it bleeds, it leads) and unrepresentativeness (“Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man”). How do they get people to accept as truth systematically negative reports from people they don’t know? By claiming that “all journalists are objective.” People fall for that claim because
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . . The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
The "natural disposition to believe” derives from curiosity, which inheres in human nature. That is what makes journalism, with its claims of objectivity, so dangerous. But of course, although the attempt at objectivity is laudable, and a claim to be attempting it is respectable, nobody can know that they actually are objective. Or that anyone else is, so joining a mutual admiration society of people who will swear to your objectivity is no defense against hypocrisy in claiming objectivity for yourself.
The very fact that journalists will admit to “If it bleeds, it leads,” and “Man Bites Dog” bias marks journalists as cynics. Who else but a cynic could claim that systematic negativity was objectivity????
“It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man . . . in the arena,” T.R. said. “If you have a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” Elizabeth Warren said. The former assertion is faith, the latter, cynicism about the “credit” called ownership. Socialism is inherently cynical, and journalists are inherently inclined toward cynicism.
The logical point of attack against wire service journalism, besides pointing out the above, is to charge the wire services with monopoly control of journalism. The wire services were historically “too big to fail” because economizing on the use of expensive bandwidth in the transmission of the news was taken to be vitally important. But in the 21^st Century, bandwidth is dirt cheap. Therefore, in principle, wire service journalism should be vulnerable to a Sherman Antitrust Act lawsuit.