Friday, January 31, 2020

The News They Won't Report

Wednesday afternoon, Tapper tweeted, "A Trump campaign official just RTed a tweet containing the name of the alleged whistleblower." Tapper's third-grade tattletale behavior was in response to Trump campaign deputy communications director Matt Wolking retweeting investigative journalist Paul Sperry, with a photo showing Ciaramella meeting with Ukrainian officials in 2015.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts refused to admit Paul's question in the trial, but why was Tapper playing Twitter tattletale against a Trump campaign staffer in an apparent effort to suppress the name Eric Ciaramella? As Professor Glenn Reynolds has often said, the media in general have become "Democratic Party operatives with bylines." Their coverage is organized on the basis of what will help Democrats win elections and advance the party's agenda, and anything contrary to that organizing principle, they consider not newsworthy.

The bias was so obvious during the Democratic primaries that supporters of Hillary's rival Bernie Sanders dubbed CNN the "Clinton News Network." Why did CNN treat Sanders so unfairly? Wasn't it because they viewed Clinton as the more "Electable" candidate in the general election? That confidence in Clinton's electability, widely shared in the so-called "Mainstream" media, arguably fed into the over-confidence within the Clinton campaign, which clearly underestimated Trump's appeal to blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The benefit of having a majority of the new media acting as Democratic propaganda operatives is diminished if Democrats make the mistake of believing their own publicity, or the public becomes aware of the unbalanced nature of what is being presented as "News." In 2016, biased coverage led Democrats to underestimate the appeal of Trump's populist message, and Trump made it a habit to call attention to how biased the media really is.

What did Tapper imagine would be the effect of his tattling on Matt Wolking? Did he suppose the Trump campaign would fire Wolking? Or did he hope that perhaps Twitter's own censorship squads would suppress Wolking's Twitter account?

The massive crowds turn out for Trump's rallies cheer when he criticizes the "Fake news" media.

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics noted this week, "Trump's job approval is now the highest it has been in our average since Feb. 5, 2017." Does anyone think this trend will be reversed if, somehow, Democrats can get enough GOP senators to cross the aisle and vote to drag out the impeachment trial beyond this weekend? Maybe Jake Tapper thinks so, but he seems to believe his job is to report only what Democrats want to hear - and the most important news, he never reports at all.

https://spectator.org/the-news-they-wont-report/

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