With the slimy, smarmy, Trump son-in-law. Jared Kushner, bragging about the deal the Trump campaign made with Sinclair Broadcasting Group and the general behavior of the broadcast and cabloid media in this past election, it's obvious that the American corporate media is not separate from politics but is a direct player in politics as no print media has been since the advent of television. The story about that in The Hill unintentionally revealed that that in its story Kushner revealing the corrupt deal, they framed it in people not wanting to be told how to vote by the media, but that's not what it means.
On this front, The Hill compiled a list of major newspaper endorsements of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before the election. The results were staggering to absorb, as the Republican received a grand total of two endorsements while Clinton took home 57, including endorsements from key newspapers in “blue wall” states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, all of which powered Trump's unlikely victory.
The takeaway is clear: Despite the editorial boards of hometown papers far and wide strongly urging their readers to vote for Clinton in no uncertain terms, Trump still won key states that haven't gone a Republican's way since Duran Duran's apex in the ‘80s.
What it actually shows is that print media has stopped being a decisive political force, For worse, with no alternative better, broadcast and cabloid media are the media that sway elections and those have been in the business of creating and promoting Trump for decades. They have also been nearly uniform in pushing every lie the Republican Party, right-wing think tanks and billionaire funded front groups have told about Hillary Clinton for the past quarter of a century. The Hill also pointed out that the local broadcast TV owner Sinclair has far more reach than even cabloid media.
Many Sinclair stations exist in the Midwestern swing states key to Trump's victory and in some cases reach more viewers than CNN, a network Trump has consistently attacked more than any other as “unfair” and “dishonest” before and after the election.
In Ohio, for example, Sinclair averages 250,000 viewers while CNN only registers 30,000.
250,000 is about a hundred thousand more than the circulation of the largest newspaper in Ohio, the Plain Dealer which, though it endorsed Hillary Clinton it is hardly a liberal newspaper. The endorsement disparity means that print journalists, as a group, are more responsible than show-biz "journalism". There is no way to analyze such a thing without taking into account that Hillary Clinton is qualified to be president of a democracy, Donald Trump is entirely unqualified and a classic media created fascist strongman in the Mussolini - Berlusconi line. It was also apparent by the time endorsements were made that Donald Trump was the candidate favored by and likely being run by Vladimir Putin.
It should be understood that when I talk about the media in this context, I am only addressing those parts of it that have real political impact. It's fairly safe to leave out all but the largest and most influential newspapers and even those might be, in reality, of relative unimportance to the consideration. The New York Times has other things to answer for, it is a major player in the destruction of democracy. There are a few other print venues which do, too.
The concept of the media held by the people who wrote the pathetically inadequate First Amendment in no way matches the media we have, the decentralized nature of print media in the age of letterpress printing is as unlike modern media as could be imagined. And also different is the impact between the act of reading words in black and white on a page and having a TV blare multi-media messaging designed to look like reality so as to have maximum impact in attracting viewers and selling its message to them. The designed manipulation of electronic media leaves the old methods of doing that in written text in the dusts of history.
The pretense that the "founders" concept of the media was anything like what exists today, its role in forming the opinion and mind of voters and its proven ability to destroy wise and informed government and the good will necessary for a peaceful, decent society has to give way to the reality that one of the major projects of the American media in the last half century has been to destroy those in favor of the multi-millionaire and now billionaire owners of it. NPR shows that even allegedly "public media" will do that because it will sell out to the same forces.
The American people, the alleged intellectual class, the legal, judicial and political establishment will either face the disgusting and horrific reality of what TV, radio and now internet media are doing to us and their program of destroying democracy by destroying a sense of so much as the truth or we should face the fact that the absurd pseudo-18th century dogma on the First Amendment will give us fascism. You won't find the ACLU or media lawyers or the self-appointed champions of civil liberties facing that fact, you won't hear it discussed seriously and in a way that is anything but self-serving in the media which the failed fraud of free-speech absolutism favors. It was invented by those in the hire of the media, after all.
The media in the United States, certainly in its politically effective form of radio, TV and the depths of online media have shown it is anything but patriotic. That is if by American patriotism you mean the maintenance of egalitarian democracy, the only meaning the word should have anywhere now that we know it is the only legitimate form of government. The American media might pledge allegiance to the flag and the "republic for which it stands" but their real allegiance is to their owners and the financial benefit of those who make money from it or who could be beneficial to it. There is nothing more obvious from the conduct of the media in creating and promoting Trump that they are, by intention, hostile to egalitarian democracy. We had better face the fact that the founders didn't understand because such media as we have could not have been imagined by them anymore than they could fathom the total deficit of honor and decency in members of the elite class who were their heirs.
Democracy will either change and adapt to face the new dangers to it or it will die, it is as simple as that. Ours shows little to any sign that it can even face the most obvious of facts that come from the election of Trump with a minority of the vote, by the very mechanisms that the Founders thought would save democracy if the voters went nuts some time or other. Their scheme for that backfired and empowered the insane just as their privilege granted to the press backfired and produced that insanity in The People.
At the very least, the media has to be open to being punished for lying through civil lawsuits. Broadcast and cabloid media must also be prevented from polluting the alleged news with self-serving bias. There must be licenses for both that can be lost through the kind of political lying and distortion that is the regular feature of American electronic media in the past fifty years, especially since the Reagan era destruction of regulation on broadcast media. The truth has to be privileged over lies, a situation which the Supreme Court has turned on its head, privileging lies which have so many built in advantages, the truth often not being as easy to sell as a well constructed lie. Our media are the masters of the lie constructed for quick and easy sale to the maximum number of people. That has a real and destructive effect on democracy and a decent society.
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