Ahead Of 2024, Media Ponder Aloud: How Dishonest And Manipulative Can We Be? BY: EDDIE SCARRY for The Federalist
When they call for a ‘new journalistic tradition,’ what they mean is that they need a novel approach to influencing all future elections.
I’m enjoying all the “think” pieces and columns by anxiety-racked journalists who are forever coming up with new ways to say a version of, “Voters are way too stupid and we don’t trust them to do anything.”
Just last Friday The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle wrote at length about how much responsibility she attributes to herself and her peers in the media for getting Donald Trump elected in 2016. “It is no exaggeration to say he climbed into the presidency on the shoulders of the hundreds of journalists who kept treating his pronouncements as matters of epic importance,” she said, “even if it had been tapped out one-handed while schmoozing around Mar-a-Lago.”
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In essence, McArdle believes that the media were mistaken to report on the public comments and expressions of a prominent figure who was running for president and who was hosting campaign rallies attended by thousands. In doing so, she believes voters didn’t really get the point, as polls showed Trump and many of his positions gaining popularity. “This was, to state the obvious, not the effect we were hoping for,” McArdle said.
But it’s not so much that McArdle believes she or her peers failed the public. She believes the voters did.
They were supposed to look at what the media were saying and come to the same conclusion as McArdle — that Trump and everything he represented was unacceptable.
That’s not what happened, and McArdle and the rest of the corrupt press want to make sure what did happen never happens again. And so, she said it was time for a “new journalistic tradition,” which essentially amounted to treating Trump and his pending return to Twitteras if neither exists. “Rather than leaping to condemn his every pronouncement,” she wrote, “we should treat Trump’s Twitter account the way we’d treat some random account with five followers and a penchant for rancid verbal attacks: as if it were generally beneath our notice.”
