Tuesday night’s results mean a million different things all of which will be considered ad nauseam in the coming weeks and years. But not by me, at least not today. No, today I only say what can – and must – happen in the immediate future: the Mainstream Media must begin reporting the news accurately and honestly, with as little bias as possible. Trump Derangement Syndrome must be scrapped and principled argument take its place.
For the legacy media, this is a golden opportunity to “turn the page” and regain popular trust. The election was about Trump and Harris, Republicans and Democrats, but it was also a referendum on the news media, the institution that, over the past several years has degenerated into a factory for churning out the rancid sausage of dishonest and often unhinged agitprop.
The result? The news media are now the least trusted institution in American life, having sunk below even Congress. They’ve managed that astonishing feat by consistently misrepresenting or outright lying about their political opposition who’ve come to be anyone and everyone not allied with the National Security State and the Democratic Party.
That mostly means everyday Americans who dare to ask where their jobs went, who object to the depression of their wages and job prospects by 10 million illegal immigrants, who notice when two decades of money and blood spent in Afghanistan evaporate overnight, when the “Affordable Care Act” turns out to be neither, when their kids can’t go to school and their small businesses are shuttered due to rules that miraculously don’t apply to those who made them and when those rules turn out to be based on dubious or no science at all. Where’s the $45 billion that was supposed to bring high-speed internet access to rural America? Why are rioting and arson all of a sudden OK? Why is crime winked at? Why is my paycheck worth a fraction of what it was three years ago?
And why is everyone who dares to notice those things and ask those simple, obvious, pertinent questions tagged a “racist” and then forgotten? Why is the press the tool of governing elites who neither know nor care about the rest of us?
All that red paint on Tuesday’s electoral map represents a thrashing not only of Democratic Party policies but the MSM that backed them and now feign astonishment that so many Americans reject what they unquestioningly embrace. Now – this minute – is the time for the MSM to turn away from the blatantly partisan misinformation in which they’ve trafficked for the last eight years. Now is the time for basic honesty, for principle.
Alas, the “early returns” aren’t promising. Trump had barely given his victory speech when Mother Jones’s David Corn tweeted that – can you guess? – it’s all Russia’s fault. Of course it was. Joy Reed cried “racism.” Does she ever say anything else? Jill Fillipovic at Slate and Joe Scarborough at MSNBC identified misogyny as the culprit. Hey, what else could it be?
Journalist Matt Taibbi summed up the response to the Trump win thus:
If you’re keeping score, that means white men, white women, black men, Hispanic men, and nonwhite voters generally were to blame for Trump’s win.
That’s just about everyone.
In short, as the usual opiners see it, the election results are not simply a fact, but a problem: the wrong person won. And what the problem isn’t – can’t possibly be – is Biden Administration policy, an incompetent and apparently stupid candidate, an anti-democratic selection process or a rabidly mendacious MSM. No, all of that was fine; the problem is, once again, the voters – all troglodytes, all racists, all misogynists, deplorables and garbage.
Election Day is past and Trump/Vance won both the electoral and the popular votes. Today’s electoral map is blue on the northeast and west coasts and red essentially everywhere else. In every single state, Kamala Harris underperformed Joe Biden in 2020. This was a wholesale rejection of the past four years, including the MSM who, day after tedious day, assured us that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack,” inflation was all in our minds, masks worked, Ukraine was winning, etc.
The legacy media now face their Come-to-Jesus moment. Will they learn that the popular rejection of Kamala Harris was a rejection of them too? As Taibbi succinctly points out, Tuesday’s results demonstrate “the incredible fact of eight years and millions of hours of hysterical propaganda somehow achieving negative results…” We can see it. Can they?
I understand their predicament. As social media began to burgeon a decade+ ago, they discovered that their income streams would no longer come from advertisers but subscribers. That meant playing exclusively to their base, reporting facts and opinions that salved the fears, fed the hopes and stroked the egos of the like-minded while ignoring or denigrating everything and everyone else. That kept the NYT, the WaPo, et al. afloat, but it’s also what brought them to be held in such disdain and submerged in the Japanese Trench of trustworthiness.
So what’s a paper/network to do? Continue with what pays but that pushes the entire organization ever further toward irrelevancy and into the company of used car salesmen? Or return to at least a semblance of honesty, integrity and balance?
While they’re pondering the way forward (if they are), Americans continue to get our information from other sources, ones we trust, ones that respect us, ones that care what we think.
To pilfer Taibbi’s metaphor, for the U.S. press, Election Night 2024 was a giant asteroid crashing into the ocean just off the coast of Yucatan threatening extinction. For now, the dinosaurs still walk among us. Will they evolve or die?
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
