9/12/2023 0 Comments Nytimes election 2016 breakdown![]() ![]() By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious. One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. He made news by being a spectacle.ĭespite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. So news shows started devoting hours and hours simply to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.Īs his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. But television executives quickly made a surprising discovery: the more they put Trump on the air, the higher their ratings climbed. In the beginning, Donald Trump’s candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn’t a serious candidate and should be treated as a circus act. As with grief, there were several stages. No one in modern times had seen anything like it. This was a whole new approach to politics. But I was still shocked at what happened. I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. The rest of that journalistic ethos-“afflict the comfortable”-leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.ĭuring the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. ![]() Think Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government-and far more exciting and glamorous. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. I grew up at The New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale-that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. ![]() Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 20, 2017, in Atlanta, Georgia, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar. ![]()
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