They did whatever they could, however they could, to take Trump out, and they did so in plain view of the public with a plain purpose in mind. They lost, but now we’re supposed to feel sorry for them, so sorry that they failed to achieve the goal and the person they persecuted, relentlessly, maliciously, and without any remorse whatsoever plans to make them pay.
On July 13, 2016, New York University’s Jay Rosen published an editorial in The Washington Post that declared journalism as we had known it for almost a century no longer worked in the age of Donald Trump, arguing that “Donald Trump is crashing the system” and “Journalists need to build a new one.” In his view, “Journalists commonly divide information from persuasion, as when they separate the ‘news’ from the ‘opinion’ section, or ‘reporters’ from ‘columnists.’ This is fine as far as it goes (and they get criticized harshly when they don’t honor this norm), but the distinction won’t help much in understanding why the 2016 campaign has been such an intellectual challenge for the media. Everything that happens in election coverage is premised on a kind of opinion: that our votes should be based on reliable information about what the candidates intend to do if elected. Remove that assumption and the edifice crashes. But this is exactly what the candidacy of Donald Trump does. It upends the assumptions required for the traditional forms of campaign journalism even to make sense.” As a result, Mr. Rosen proposed a radical and unprecedented end to these norms, calling for journalists to collaborate with one another against then candidate Donald Trump, writing, “They may have to call Trump out with a forcefulness unseen before. They may have to risk the breakdown of decorum in interviews and endure excruciating awkwardness. Hardest of all, they will have to explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.” Four years later, Mr. Rosen was still espousing the same ideas, telling the progressive “explainer” website Vox.com that there’s a “code that tells journalists what’s newsworthy. You won’t see it written down except maybe in a journalism professor’s research. But it includes timeliness, conflict, anything totally unexpected, anything seemingly consequential, anything that involves a charismatic person whose human interest looms large in the news, and so on. Trump has hacked the newsworthiness code by being newsworthy in the traditional sense every day, many times a day. He dominates the public conversation. He overwhelms journalists trying to process all this news. He exhausts the patience of the public. And he throws off so many false or misleading statements that he breaks the controls or checks on that as well.” While lamenting that “The press just hasn’t figured out how to build new routines on the wreckage of the old,” he declared “the producers of news aren’t capable of dealing with Trump within their present rules and formulas. One of the odd things about the news system as it stands is that there’s no emergency switch. To fix this you would have to call a halt to regular journalism, suspend your routines.” Finally, he concluded, “If our journalists continue in the assumption that we have a normal system where there is a contest for power between roughly similar parties with different philosophies, then every day of operation they will be distorting the picture more and more. Can that go on indefinitely? I don’t know, but it seems to me that we’re headed for a crash.”
Putting this another way, the media effectively declared war on Donald Trump before he took office, and has continued to justify this war ever since, abandoning all pretext of objectivity and embracing coordinated advocacy. Thus, they embarked on a years long campaign to destroy the President of the United States, hyperventilating over matters big and small, promoting any anti-Trump voice however suspect (does anyone remember Michael Avennati?), promulgating any anti-Trump story whether or not it was true, and giving themselves awards for their efforts. There was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russia Collusion hoax predicated entirely on campaign opposition sourced from Russia itself. There was the lionization of “anonymous,” a supposedly high level government official who admitted that parts of the government were close to committing treason to collective cheers from progressives; some claimed “anonymous” was Vice President Mike Pence himself, only to find out the person was a completely unknown mid-level bureaucrat. There were wildly manipulated, out-of-context quotations, such as when the President declared unequivocally that white supremacists should be “condemned totally” while the media insisted he called them “very fine people.” There were constant, frequently illegal and false leaks from individuals who refused to identify themselves by name, yet were certain President Trump was calling our soldiers “suckers” and “losers” despite that those on the record flatly denied it happened. There were “mistakes” that claimed President Trump had done something nefarious, such as then CNN claimed that the President and his son received an encryption key to access hacked documents from Wikileaks, only to find out the email came in 10 days later than they said and contained only publicly available information. The “news” such as it was, was augmented by a panoply of “experts,” most of whom insisted the “walls were closing in” and President Trump was days away from being removed from office, either under impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the obscure emoluments clause in the Constitution, or my personal favorite, being “frog marched” out of the White House in handcuffs. For the first time in history, they brought in psychologists and medical doctors to assess his physical and mental condition, undoubtedly finding it lacking if not clinical even for things as minor as walking slowly down a ramp with leather soled shoes or picking up a glass of water with two hands. Conversely, positive stories were suppressed, as were stories negatively reflecting his opposition, sometimes in collusion with government officials and social media as in the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop or President Biden’s cognitive state. Some of it was downright petty and absurd. Who could forget CNN breathlessly reporting that the President liked two scoops of ice cream or the feeding frenzy over how he fed coy fish? Most of it was accompanied by hyperbolic rhetoric claiming the President was a Russian stooge (despite doing more to thwart Russian ambitions than any leader since Ronald Reagan), an authoritarian, a strong man, a malignant narcissist, a fascist, an admirer of Hitler, like Hitler, or at least Hitler adjacent. Overall, innuendo, exaggeration, and falsehoods, both knowing and accidentally, dominated, whatever it took to take out what they perceived as the Trump threat.
Last month, the American people decided otherwise, re-electing him after four years in the wilderness and countless legal entanglements, meaning President-elect Donald Trump can be credited with defeating the media as much as his two Democrat opponents. Last week, he continued his winning streak by scoring a major legal victory against the media in particular, when ABC News agreed to settle a defamation suit by donating $15 million to his Presidential Library and $1 million in legal fees after anchor and Clinton-crony George Stephanopoulos referred to him as a rapist several times, as in that Trump “has been found liable for rape by a jury.” The statement, however, like so much else of what they have claimed since 2015, was false, the opposite of what had actually happened. In fact, the jury in the New York City civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll specifically found that he wasn’t liable for rape, literally checking a box labelled “no.” As NBC News described, it “The nine-member jury checked the box marked ‘no’ when it was asked whether Carroll had proven ‘by a preponderance of the evidence’ that ‘Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll.’” In response, President Trump sued Disney and ABC News, arguing correctly that Mr. Stephanopoulus “knowingly or recklessly made multiple false and disparaging statements regarding Plaintiff during ABC broadcasts.” Since then, President Trump has filed another lawsuit, this time against Anne Selzer and The Des Moines Register for publishing a poll prior to the election that showed him losing Iowa by three points, when he went on to win it by 16. As the President himself put it on Monday, “I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I’m going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points.” According to the lawsuit, he deserves “accountability for brazen election interference,” declaring the poll itself “election-interfering fiction” rather than a good faith effort to measure public sentiment. “Defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the filing read. Interestingly, the suit has been filed under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act that prohibits deceptive advertising rather than defamation, meaning he, at least, believes the poll was published under fraudulent pretenses. In that regard, the President alleged that “Millions of Americans, including Plaintiff, residents of Iowa, and Iowans who contributed to President Trump’s Campaign and its affiliated entities (the ‘Trump 2024 Campaign’), were deceived by the doctored Harris Poll” and that the “polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional” because The Des Moines Register has a large circulation and offers “a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters.”
Perhaps needless to say, legal experts and assorted media types immediately insisted the suit was a non-starter despite ABC News’ recent settlement agreement, which at least suggests the President has been on stronger legal ground than his detractors claim in some cases. “I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” declared Rick Hasen, an election law “expert” at UCLA School of Law. “The odds of success here are slim to none, but winning in court is not likely the real goal of this lawsuit,” explained Clay Calvert, a media law expert and professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, before getting to what he believes is the President’s real motivation. “The true motivation is to intimidate the press and journalists. I unfortunately suspect this lawsuit is just a harbinger of things to come,” he insisted. Equally needless to say, the majority of the mainstream media agreed. The New York Times complained that the President was “escalating threats” against the media and using his power to “punish people he claims have wronged him.” Fox News commentator Howard Kurtz posted on social media that he doesn’t believe the President will prevail, because it is “very hard for a public figure to win,” but “the chilling effect is clear.” Joel Simon, director of the City University of New York’s Journalism Protection Initiative told CNN, “I would also be concerned about the arbitrary, petty, and vindictive nature of these legal actions that President-elect Trump is pursuing. The possibility of legal victory is slim because under the ‘actual malice’ standard reporting done in good faith is protected in the U.S. But for a smaller or less-resourced news organization, mounting a legal defense can be a serious challenge,” studiously ignoring that he’s using the wrong standard. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said the First Amendment itself was at risk. Finally, Lloyd Green, writing for The Guardian, declared without irony or self awareness that “Donald Trump’s disturbing war on the press has now escalated,” claiming that “The Donald Trump vengeance tour is on the road and the media is in its crosshairs” and “his message remains clear: bend the knee or else.” Oddly, Mr. Green concluded by claiming President Trump might end up being the one in legal jeopardy because “What’s sauce for the goose has a way of becoming sauce for the gander. In late September, just weeks before the 2024 election, news surfaced that Rasmussen Reports, a polling operation, shared its results with the senior members of the Trump campaign…This raises potential legal issues and headaches. Turnabout is fair play. Trump may have inadvertently opened the door for attacks on his friends.”
As if we needed any more evidence that the media lacks any and all self-awareness, above and beyond Mr. Green’s own failings, it’s as if the geniuses in the chattering class seemed to have suddenly realized that losing a nine year war against the most powerful man in the known universe, that they themselves declared, much of it predicated on outright lies and falsehoods, could have dramatic consequences. If “turnabout is fair play,” and Mr. Green himself declared, then surely they are only reaping what they have sown to use the old expression. They themselves declared they were abandoning their standards. They themselves gleefully coordinated with one another. They themselves published falsehoods, from the devastating to the outrageous. They themselves turned them into advocates against Donald Trump at any and all cost. They did whatever they could, however they could, to take him out, and they did so in plain view of the public with a plain purpose in mind. They lost, but now we’re supposed to feel sorry for them, so sorry that they failed to achieve the goal and the person they persecuted, relentlessly, maliciously, and without any remorse whatsoever plans to make them pay. If only they’d remembered the equally old expression about messing with the bull and getting the horns, they wouldn’t be in this position. Instead, they will get what’s coming to them, and at least it’s well deserved.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 