There are so many things to be excited about this week that it’s hard to savor any one thing. There’s the mere fact of Donald Trump’s victory, which is glorious enough to give us a permanent smile for days and days. There’s the flipside: Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which allows us to breathe a sigh of relief that feels unbelievably good. There’s the knowledge that, with the assistance of a Republican Congress, Trump is getting ready to undo Obamacare and other policies that have kept America stagnant for a long time.
And then there is the media.
Oh boy, the media.
Election night was a powerful rejection of the liberal mainstream media, which can no longer be regarded as “news” without a mocking tone. They’ve been in the pocket of the Democratic Party for a long time, but they really went for broke this year. If the major newspapers are extinct by this time next year, we wouldn’t be shocked. They’ve outlived their usefulness.
And now, of course, they are scared stiff about what President Trump might do to the profession they still have the audacity to call “journalism.” In the Washington Post this week, we learn that Trump poses a serious threat to the media in four explicit ways. Let’s take a gander at this sad continuation of self-delusion:
President-elect Donald Trump said during the campaign that he was “running against the crooked media.” He referred to journalists as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” But beyond the insults and the accusations of a conspiracy against him, Trump also raised the specter of concrete threats to the press.
WaPo reports these threats to consist of: Stronger libel laws, less access to the president, less trust and less money, and reduced funding for public broadcasting.
So to agree with them, you’d have to believe that the press should have the legal freedom to lie and publish character assassination pieces, that the news business can only survive if the president respects the reporters, and that we would be losing something if NPR went the way of the dodo. Is anyone getting worked up about any of this?
Oh, and as for “less access to the president,” that didn’t seem to bother any of these people when Obama was running the least transparent White House in modern history, so give us a break.
But they’re right about one thing, they are under threat. But when the death of their industry arrives, the coroner’s ruling will be: Suicide.
