The Media vs. Trump

Credibility is a person’s most valuable asset.  For someone in the media credibility is essential.  People make mistakes and the occasional mistake can be forgiven.  However, when an individual or organization continuously makes “mistakes” favoring one side of an argument their bias becomes obvious.

There are people on the left and people on the right of the political spectrum.  The vast majority of people are somewhere in the middle.  The left and right need to appeal to this group in order to attain power.  In this battle to capture the middle the left has a powerful advantage.  The left controls the commanding heights of our society: academia, the bureaucracy (7.2% of Washington DC voters voted for Trump), the entertainment industry, and most importantly, the media.  The left also has a powerful disadvantage.  Their fringe includes demonstrator often carrying foreign flags, rioters destroying property, protesters wearing genitalia hats, signs with various obscenities, gay parades with public nudity and after many of their rallies many sites can be declared toxic waste dumps.  

It is therefore important for the representatives of the left to appear reasonable and well informed.  They are failing miserably in this matter.  CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed, “The person (Trump) is not dealing with the world in which we live.”  Tapper is completely correct. But who is in more touch with reality Trump or Trapper?  The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza commented on the President’s press conference, “There was a rawness to his attacks, a personal invective.  Trump's appeal to voters is, and always has been, how he is able to speak to them on an emotional rather than an intellectual level.”   I have to confess I feel no tingle up my leg when Trump speaks.

The left cannot abandon their narrative that Trump was put into the presidency by Vladimir Putin.  Chris Cillizza claims Trump’s attacks on the media are a distraction designed to deflect attention away from the Russian connection.  He claims,  “It's also one that will almost certainly succeed in changing the subject from Russia and Mike Flynn.”  Dan Rather, an expert on credibility, remarked, “The White House has no credibility on this issue. Their spigot of lies - can't we finally all agree to call them lies - long ago lost them any semblance of credibility."  Rather suggests that this “crisis” may be even worse that Watergate.  He commented, “Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now.”

NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I'm sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American.”  Todd did not criticize President Obama when he attacked Fox News.  Fox’s Shepard Smith dredged  up some information he learned in Psychology 101: “It is crazy what we are watching every day, it is absolutely crazy.  He keeps repeating ridiculous throwaway lines that are not true at all and sort of avoiding this issue of Russia as if we are some kind of fools for asking the question.”  He followed this with a demand, “we are not fools for asking those questions, and we demand to know the answer to this question. You owe this to the American people.”  It appears the media is in a very demanding mood.  Jake Tapper also had a demand for the President,  “Now get to work, and stop whining about it.”

Trump’s recent press conference has been described as “blustery and bombastic.”  For those who watched the press conference there was nothing blustery or bombastic about it.  The leftist media are damaging their cause through exaggerating and their emotional responses to the President.  They see themselves as a special class.  CNN’s Chris Cuomo declared, “Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents (the Wikileak documents). It’s different for the media.”  Their wailing and gnashing of teeth is unbecoming.  John Bolton has pointed out that, “the notion that the press is somehow specially protected by the First Amendment...that they have a special status, is ridiculous.”