There's a good read at billmoyers.com this morning from Columbia University communications scholar Todd Gitlin on the topic of the broken political media's losing battle to maintain a "both sides" front in covering neo-fascist rabble rouser Donald "Rump" Trump's campaign, and to face up to their decades-long role in helping to sell right-wing canards. An excerpt:
"Political journalists have yet to face their complicity in normalizing much of the garbage that Trump has packaged into pellets in this campaign. The normalization of which I speak is not new. For years, respectable media treated climate-change-deniers as legitimate dissenters, with lazy point-counterpoint coverage that gave the voices of a few flat-earthers equal weight with a vast scientific consensus. For years, they have left unquestioned a conservative (now metamorphosed by media groupthink into 'centrist') uproar about the magnitude of American taxes."Rump's flailing presidential campaign is helping to undermine many of those false, conservative assertions, but as Gitlin notes, there's a very long way to go for the press. Take the Beltway media's golden boy, Speaker Paul "Lyin'" Ryan, who's been given so many free passes by them on his radical, reactionary legislative agenda:
"Ryan & Co. only seem respectable because their false premises go unexamined, starting with the crackpot, easily falsifiable claim that the United States is crushed by a tax burden second to none in the wealthy world, and supplemented by the corollaries that trickle-down economics works, that there is something non-idiotic about the existence of a “Laffer curve,” that American business suffers from excessive regulation, and that raising wages would impede growth. [snip]
It’s only if you think that the national debt has risen to paralyzing proportions, and that therefore balancing the budget is imperative, that you would give a second glance to the likes of the Ryan budget." (emphasis added)Anyone holding their breath until the political media comes around to exposing the toxic policies of the right needs to find a soft place to land.
BONUS: Here's James Fallows' take on how the narrative- driven political media might "pivot" in its coverage of Rump:
Next wk will see collision of 2 powerful media instincts:— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) August 13, 2016
1) Story must change ('doing better than you think')
2) Bandwagon ('losers lose')
