The new battle cry: Why can't the media 'stop' Trump?

dream_weaver · March 19, 2016

As Donald Trump’s detractors grow increasingly loud and desperate, they are aiming their ire at a new target:

The media.

Trump must be stopped, they declare, and it’s the media’s mission to halt him in his tracks.

It’s an argument that fundamentally misreads the role of the press.

On the face of it, this is true enough. As Miss Rand points out in her book, Voice of Reason in her article How to Read (and Not to Write)

Politicians are not the cause of a culture's trend, only its consequence. They get their notions from the cultural atmosphere, particularly from newspapers, magazines, and TV commentaries; they speak as these media teach them to speak.

But that's about as far as this news article goes. What isn't asked is Rand's next question in her piece, "Who teaches the media?"

And now we come down to the root: of all our institutions, it is the universities that are primarily responsible for this country losing its way—and of all the university departments, it is the departments of philosophy

One journalist misses it here.

I am not pro-Trump or anti-Trump. I am a journalist. And journalists who aren’t in the opinion business are supposed to be fair. They often fall short, of course, but it is not a “failure” on their part that Trump is on his way to the Republican nomination—that is, unless you’re a Trump-hater who thinks it’s our duty to knock out the candidate you so detest.

Another one partially caught it

“I overestimated the media. My profession is no longer a trusted arbiter of the truth, which means the country lacks a common set of facts around which to argue. A broken business model makes media companies desperate for clicks and ratings, which makes news leaders vulnerable to Trump’s deal-with-the-devil bravado. You can’t talk to a journalist today without hearing about the shrinking of their newsrooms—in both size and mission.”.

Trusted arbiter of the truth. As Fransisco retorted to Jim Taggert when he claimed he had a right to know.

"A right? Aren't you being old-fashioned, James?"

The broken business model, the shrinking newsrooms—in both size and mission are due to implementing the university teachings of "truth". That story is going to have to wait for investigative reporting to rise up to the task, or has someone already written about it?

So to answer the question of why the media can't 'stop' Trump? In essence, the media sowed the seeds. It took time for them to germinate. Rather than a carefully nurtured crop maturing into bountiful harvest, could these be what Miss Rand described as the weeds of prehistoric doctrines creeping into the intellectual wilderness? In short, the media enabled him.

Edited March 19, 2016 by dream_weaver