TRUMP VS THE MEDIA W
hen Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, the national media was already eager to watch it crash and burn. Offering endless hours of coverage, media outlets thought they would end up with an embarrassing shellacking of historic proportions.
The media obviously miscalculated Trump’s appeal. Reporters and analysts were shell- shocked by the victory. But they wouldn’t make the same mistakes in 2020... The writing that Trump might win was clearly on the wall... That he even became the nominee should have been a clue that Trump tapped into something that connected with voters. Some journalists were shocked he made it to the general, though many credited his ascent to a crowded Republican field. They were blind to reality. After all, what do Republicans know about connecting with the American people ? The GOP adopted a thinly-populist ideology espoused by a reality TV star. Hillary Clinton would be the next president, and the media couldn’t wait to humiliate the braggadocious, crude New Yorker with endless hours of preening that they always knew this defeat was coming. The media obviously miscalculated Trump’s appeal. Reporters and analysts were shell- shocked by the victory. But they wouldn’t make the same mistakes in 2020... Using two monumentally important stories – a global pandemic and civil unrest
– the media seemed to develop an almost- coordinated attempt to gaslight the American people. They were going to convince their viewers and readers to vote for Trump’s opponent, whomever it may be. Members of the media decided to become activists. Never before has the general media so openly and wantonly campaigned against a candidate in such a breathtakingly dishonest way. While there was clear bias and nefarious intent in the endless hours of coverage that outlets gave to Trump in 2016, the media wasn’t openly campaigning against him. But that all changed when Trump became president... MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, once a Trump ally, casually labels the president a “fascist” and an “autocrat,” and on CNN, Don Lemon matter- of-factly declares the president a “racist.” No more objective reporting or even good-faith analysis... They developed an agenda. The media started 2020 with a tremendous opportunity to destroy an American president – the global pandemic. They took on the challenge, setting up Trump in lose-lose scenarios, attacking every decision he made as both too harsh, yet somehow also not harsh enough. At the time, we didn’t grasp the seriousness of the virus since communist China withheld crucial information from the world. Nevertheless, the White House declared
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October 2020
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