It's a little late for the elite political media that

Quote:

It's a little late for the elite political media that boomed "free trade" and the miracles of the "globalized economy" in a "flat" world to suddenly look up and discover that a 55-year old steelworker in Indiana likely will not be getting a job writing code for the Next New Thing.

It's a little late for the elite political media to discover that de-unionization has not been altogether a boon in those few sectors of the industrial economy that haven't been cored out or sent to Vietnam.


The Media, Nick Kristof Included, Still Doesn't Understand Its Role in Creating Donald Trump
This is not new—it was decades in the making.



BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
MAR 28, 2016

Before we take a look at what got thrown across the electric teevee machine this weekend, we should address the current Hot Journamalism Takez being cooked up by those people mystified by the rise of He, Trump and who also are publicly flagellating themselves for what they perceive to be their part in his unlikely—and unearthly—rise to political power.

Come on down, Nick Kristof!

Sabato is particularly critical of Sunday morning news program hosts who have allowed Trump to "appear" by telephone, instead of in person. Although many of us journalists have derided Trump, the truth is that he generally outsmarted us (with many exceptions, for there truly have been serious efforts to pin him down and to investigate Trump University and his various business failings).

He manipulated television by offering outrageous statements that drew ever more cameras—without facing enough skeptical follow-up questions. It's not that we shouldn't have covered Trump's craziness, but that we should have aggressively provided context in the form of fact checks and robust examination of policy proposals.

A candidate claiming that his business acumen will enable him to manage America deserved much more scrutiny of his bankruptcies and mediocre investing.

I feel your pain, big fella. But, you see, I also read the work of many scurvy bloggers, and they were on to the potential of He, Trump's Big Con long before much of the elite political media tumbled to it, for reasons that will become obvious as we examine the other cilice that Kristof has tied around his career.

We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing:

We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn't appreciate how much his message resonated. "The media has been out of touch with these Americans," Curry notes. Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don't adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.

This is all my bollocks on a number of levels. First, there are people covering the plight of the disappearing middle class all over the place—in local papers, in academic studies, on the electric teevee machine, and even in Kristof's own newspaper. T

here is a Democratic candidate for president whose entire damn campaign is based on the premise that the American middle class is going the way of the Anasazi.

It's a little late for the elite political media that boomed "free trade" and the miracles of the "globalized economy" in a "flat" world to suddenly look up and discover that a 55-year old steelworker in Indiana likely will not be getting a job writing code for the Next New Thing. It's a little late for the elite political media to discover that de-unionization has not been altogether a boon in those few sectors of the industrial economy that haven't been cored out or sent to Vietnam.

But, in any case, as far as Kristof's main point goes, that's not the story that that "we in the media" missed. For four decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980, hitching his party to the snake-oil of supply-side economics and to the sad remnants of white supremacy, often as expressed through an extremist splinter of American Protestantism, the Republican Party has been afflicted with the prion disease that now has blossomed into utter public madness. That's the story everyone was too blind, stupid, or afraid to tell. You know who in the media really created He, Trump?

Anyone who laughed at Ronald Reagan's casual relationship with the truth and with empirical reality. Anyone who blew off Iran-Contra. Anyone who draped C-Plus Augustus in a toga after 9/11. Anyone who cast Newt Gingrich as a serious man of ideas. Anyone who cast Paul Ryan as an economic savant, that's who.

Anyone who wrote admiring profiles of how shrewd Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were. Anyone who put Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck on the cover of national magazines based simply on their ratings.

Anyone who put Matt Drudge on a public-affairs program. Anyone who watched the conservative movement, the only animating force the Republican party has, drive the party further and deeper into madness, they are the ones who share the blame.

He, Trump merely has taken the bark off ideas that were treated as legitimate for far too long by far too many people, most of whom don't really give a damn about the plight of the vanishing middle class except for its use as fuel for rage-based, self-destructive politics.

The funny thing is that Kristof himself came close to saying this exact thing back in February. But he couldn't quite make himself go all the way off the diving board, as this passage indicates:

"Of course, Democrats also sometimes campaigned outrageously, and some Republicans scorned the politics of hate. There was a marvelous scene in 2008 when John McCain was running against Obama, and a woman at a McCain rally suggested that Obama was an Arab who couldn't be trusted. McCain corrected her and then praised his rival: "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, a citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues."

Political nastiness and conspiracy theories were amplified by right-wing talk radio, television and websites—and, yes, there are left-wing versions as well, but they are much less influential. Democrats often felt disadvantaged by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but in retrospect Limbaugh and Fox created a conservative echo chamber that hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant."

Poor Nick. He's just inches away from honesty and then the powerful Both Sides undertow pulls him back out to sea. Not a single example of Democrats' "campaigning outrageously," but time enough to genuflect once again in the general direction of John McCain, the Last Honest Man.

(And, I would point out, someone who has been as batshit over the presidency of Barack Obama as any talk-show wingnut.) Not a single "left-wing version" cited. But Kristof goes out of his way to quote Erick Erickson, who is nuttier than Trump ever thought of being, but who is treated in the piece like a serious conservative thinker, which should tell Kristof something.

And Democrats didn't merely "feel" disadvantaged by the rise of the crackpot news bubble. They actually were, at least in part because people like Limbaugh—who is no more a serious political thinker than is He, Trump—were treated as oracles due to their ability to sell a lot of auto glass and male enhancement nostrums.

Yes, Nick. The media bears a great responsibility for the rise of He, Trump, but not because he is sui generis, but, rather, because the media has been buying conservative charlatanism by the bucketful for so long that it's lost its bearings.

Anyway…

Given the context of our discussion, there is no choice but to hand the House Cup to This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, simply because of ABC News's continued employment of Butcher's Bill Kristol who, at this point, should be reduced to taping his political opinions to lamp-posts in Washington Square but who, in a perfect example of the media's true failings, continues to be treated as someone who knows something about anything, which he plainly doesn't.

And that's not even to mention the fact that The Clinton Guy had another week off, and in his place was conservative mole Jonathan Karl. When, say, John Nichols gets to host Meet The Press, y'all let me know, OK?

KRISTOL: No. I don't vote for Hillary Clinton and I don't vote for Donald Trump. I think we can deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination. If we fail to, we deserve to have a better choice than Clinton or Trump. Really, it's a terrible choice for the country. There are plenty of decent people who could run as independent Republicans and I think they could do pretty well.

Dan Quayle, perhaps? Sarah Palin? This is to name only two of the political giants that the genius of Butcher's Bill Kristol has visited upon the Republic.