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Unmasked. Tim Graham
Читать онлайн.Название Unmasked
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isbn 9781630061166
Автор произведения Tim Graham
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Donald J. Trump had been elected the forty-fifth President of the United States.
Liberals found themselves talking to themselves. They tried being temporarily apologetic on NBC, with Chuck Todd admitting that “we have overlooked rural America a bit too much.” Former anchor Tom Brokaw backhanded Trump’s voters as miscreants who “have to pull a pin on a grenade and roll it across the country, whatever it takes. ‘We want change, and we want big change!’” Leftist journalism professor Jeff Jarvis at New York University hyperventilated, choosing to blame the media for not being harsh enough: “I fear that journalism is irredeemably broken, a failure. My profession failed to inform the public about the fascist they are electing.” Just as New York University fails to teach journalism when it employs the likes of Jeff Jarvis.
It was the same thing with comedians on election night. What was supposed to be a knee-slapping funfest became no laughing matter. Expecting a Hillary Clinton victory, CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert was given an hour on CBS-owned Showtime for a we-won trash-talk special. They titled it Stephen Colbert’s Live Election Night Democracy’s Series Finale: Who’s Going to Clean Up This Shit? Colbert came out to a big standing ovation and cracked, “Please have a seat. You don’t need to stand for me. You don’t need to chant my name. America doesn’t have dictators . . . yet!” But then a worried Colbert proclaimed that the race was far too close: “This one is a nail biter and a passport grabber. It feels like we are trying to avoid the apocalypse and half the country is voting for the asteroid.”
As the real possibility of a Trump upset began to unfold, panic hit the set. Comedy Central Daily Show host Trevor Noah was in full hysteria, telling Colbert: “I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight. Because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants! I genuinely do not understand how America can be this disorganized or this hateful!”
Comedian Jena Friedman picked up on Colbert’s voting-for-the-asteroid metaphor: “It feels like an asteroid has just smacked into our democracy! It is so scary and sad and heartbreaking and I just wish I could be funny. Get your abortions now because we’re going to be fucked and we’re going to have to live with it!”
MSNBC hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (who also had a Showtime election series called The Circus) were on scene to add expert analysis to the comedy. Halperin clearly lost control as he wildly proclaimed, “Outside of the Civil War and World War II, and including 9/11, this may be the most cataclysmic event the country’s ever seen!” Colbert cooed his appreciation, “I’m so glad you guys are here. I wouldn’t want to be alone right now.” In the midnight hour, CNN analyst (and former Obama White House aide) Van Jones took to crying racism in defeat: “It’s hard to be a parent, tonight, for a lot of us. You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bully.’ You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bigot. . . .’ And then, you have this outcome. . . . How do I explain this to my children? This was a ‘white-lash.’ This was a ‘white-lash’ against a changing country. It was a ‘white-lash’ against a black president.”
National Public Radio was still in anger mode after the election on Wednesday’s Morning Edition news program, bringing on black author Attica Locke (who also writes for the Fox drama Empire), who rudely implied that each and every Trump supporter is a racist. NPR anchor David Greene politely suggested that it was not every one of them, but Locke refused to concede that there was a single nonracist: “I’m out with that. There’s a part of me that honestly feels like that level of politeness, where we’re not calling things what they are, is how we will never get forward.” Locke then went on Twitter to promote her taxpayer-funded radio rant: “Me on the election on NPR. The ‘R’ word is the new ‘N’ word, I guess. Why are folks afraid to say racist?” NBC Nightly News correspondent Richard Engel chronicled a global panic on the Wednesday night after Trump won: “There were gasps around the world. Headlines, ‘Trumpocalypse’ and ‘Disunited States.’ And echoes of the Brexit vote too, against the European Union establishment. But there are deeper concerns tonight that the world’s shining light of democracy has gone dark.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman echoed Halperin’s 9/11 metaphor on Friday night on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher: “This is a moral 9/11! Only 9/11 was done to us from the outside and we did this to ourselves.” Hillary losing was now the moral equivalent of losing 3,000 Americans in a terrorist attack.
That verdict came after Maher’s own angry rant against Trump voters, who he believed had sealed their own doom: “Enjoy your victory, Trump voters. Because when you’re dying because you don’t have health insurance to treat the infection you got for a back alley abortion you had to get because of fetal lead poisoning, you can say to yourself, at least I didn’t vote for someone with a private e-mail server.”
When Democrats win, it’s a victory for hope and change and national unity. When Republicans win, it is a sad day, a victory for dark forces, their vicious lies and flagrant fouls, manipulating the unruly throng. As Peter Jennings infamously said after the 1994 Republican wave election, it was “a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage,” a stomping, screaming temper tantrum, not a serious verdict on the future of America. These voters would need to see the error of their ways and know the damage they had committed.
They saw Trump’s voters just as the Clinton campaign saw them: a basket of deplorables. All season long the pro-Hillary press treated Trump’s followers with utter contempt. This was the country class showing its utter temerity in challenging the ruling class. These were extra-chromosomed rednecks in MAGA hats. As Hillary put it, they were “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
But those deplorables carried the day.
The pundits got it all wrong. They had accepted the comforting prophecies of the national media, not just regarding the coronation of Hillary Clinton, but on America’s repudiation of Donald Trump. It was a resounding rejection of the ruling class—themselves. But these elites were not going silently into the night. The media would only double down, and triple down, and quadruple down as Trump made his way to the White House. All the rules learned at journalism school were tossed aside. If the news was harmful to this man, it was to be magnified; if it was favorable to him, it was to be ignored; and if needed, the “news” was faked.
The ruling class was not about to concede an inch of turf to the peasants.
2
Defining Our Terms
THERE IS NOTHING THAT inflames media elites more than Donald Trump dismissing them as fake news. It’s not a criticism of a specific reporter, or a story, or even an outlet. It’s a blanket condemnation of an entire industry. Worse, he’s pinning this charge on what they believe to be above reproach because journalists are founts of truth, and woe to the man who challenges their integrity. They decide what is truth, and no one else.
Yet fake news exists. It has for a very long time.
In print, we think of Janet Cooke at the Washington Post who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her shocking story of Jimmy the eight-year-old cocaine addict, except she’d made the whole thing up. We think of Jayson Blair at the New York Times in 2003 pretending to report from Iraq War veteran Jessica Lynch’s tiny West Virginia hometown when he was sitting in a bar down the street from Times Square.
On television, we think of NBC rigging GM trucks to explode on cue and ABC producers with hidden cameras trying to put rotten meat on sale at Food Lion. We think of Dan Rather spreading around phony National Guard memos to destroy George W. Bush’s presidential campaign or Brian Williams claiming he was on a helicopter that took rocket fire during the Iraq War or making up scenes of floating bodies in the hurricane-flooded streets of New Orleans.
The flagrant fakery usually is cooked up in the service of a liberal goal because the ends justify the means. One could guess that some stories are “too good to check”