John R. Coyne Jr offers a
review of Howard Kurtz’s Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, and the War over the Truth for the Washington Times.
The political war between
conservatives and a largely liberal national media didn’t begin with Donald
Trump. But with his election, it’s reached a new intensity.
“The country’s top news
organizations have targeted Trump with an unprecedented barrage of negative
stories, with some no longer making much attempt to hide their contempt,”
writes veteran journalist Howard Kurtz in this strongly written and compelling
analysis.
That contempt is encapsulated
in this succinct statement from New Yorker editor David Remnick: “The election
of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the
American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the
forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and
racism.”
This charge of “racism,”
troubles Mr. Kurtz, thrown out by Mr. Trump’s critics “as an undisputed fact,
not a journalist’s assessment, and there was no room for dissent on the score.”
And even more troubling to Mr. Kurtz is how this attitude has come to permeate
not just the editorial sections of newspapers but the news stories themselves,
with reporters functioning as editorialists, rendering the once honored
journalistic principle of objectivity no longer operative.
He quotes Jim Rutenberg of
The New York Times, which vies with The Washington Post for the title of the
country’s premier NeverTrump organ. In a 2016 piece, Timesman Rutenberg
instructed his fellow journalists that no matter what their reservations about
shedding objectivity — “uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every
mainstream, non-opinion journalist” — they’re obliged to oppose Mr. Trump, “a
demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies.”
Whatever the causes of what
Mr. Kurtz calls “Trump Trauma” — perhaps fueled by an unconscious desire to
return to Watergate glory by bringing down another president — the liberal
media seem intent on destroying the Trump presidency.
And Donald Trump, writes Mr.
Kurtz, “is staking his presidency on nothing less than destroying the
credibility of the news media This is not just a feud It is scorched-earth
warfare in which only one side can achieve victory.”
Mr. Kurtz is no apologist for
President Trump, pointing out the president often generates negative stories
through his own exaggerations and tendency to shoot from the lip. In a chapter
titled “A Leaky Ship of State,” he writes that in the Trump White House, “just
about everything leaked to the press.”
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
Note: If you want to read a conservative
and fair daily newspaper, I suggest you check out the Washington Times. I’m
proud to be a regular contributor to the Washington Times.
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