Pressing the Press to Change

In the original Six Points thesis from February 14, 2016, we set forth a diagnosis of the current American political challenges under the following headings:
1. Constitution sets the Framework
2. Exactly Two Parties
3.Inevitable Polarization
4.Inevitable Progress
5.Why Conservatives Fracture
6. Playing to Win

The Key Conclusions further down that page referred to Pressure Points - Moderate Republicans and the objective journalists needed to rethink their standard response to the breakdown of the American political system. Otherwise we would continue to witness Republican party tactics that go Beyond the Pale in a system that would continue to degenerate.

Basically, if moderate Republicans and objective journalists did not find a way to change their behavior and standards, our system would eventually collapse. The Wheels of Democracy discussed the state of American democracy on November 10, 2016.

In the current New York Review of Books, Jay Rosen writes an update on the media portion of this equation in Why Trump is Winning and the Press is Losing.

My writing has focused on the supply side - what the responsible members of the press need to change. Rosen brings in the demand side, discussing the grave danger of a president who sees the press as the enemy and commands a movement of angry trolls.

He divides the Trumpified electorate into three groups:
1. Core supporters, for whom "media hate helps frame the president as a fighter for them."
2. Committed opponents, for whom"the president’s political style works by inviting ridicule and attack. Their part in the script is simply to keep the culture war going through reflexive responses to the awfulness of the Trump phenomenon. The anger, despair, and disbelief that Trump inspires in his most public doubters is felt as confirmation, and consumed as entertainment by his most committed supporters—and his trolls. Notice how if Trump’s opponents defend the reporting of an institution like The New York Times (or simply make reference to it as revealed fact), that supports his campaign to discredit the press as a merely ideological institution."
3. All Others - "Americans who are neither committed supporters nor determined critics of Donald Trump. On them, the campaign to discredit the press works by generating noise and confusion, raising what economists call “search costs” for good information. If the neither-nors give up and are driven from the attention field, that is a win for the president as the polarizer-in-chief."

His piece is a must-read. In it, he goes on to say:
"There is a risk that journalists could do their job brilliantly, and it won’t really matter, because Trump supporters categorically reject it, Trump opponents already believed it, and the neither-nors aren’t paying close enough attention."

Rosen makes a strong point that aligns with points made on this blog. For example, he notes the failure of fact checking:
"There is a risk that established forms of journalism will be unable to handle the strain that Trump’s behavior places upon them. For example, the practice we came to call fact-checking has had zero effect in preventing the president from repeating falsehoods. There is a risk that the press will hang onto these forms well past their sell-by date because it’s what they know. They want things to be normal."

And Rosen brings up his 2010 notes on the "View from Nowhere" by which he means "the attempt to acquire authority by constructing an artificial impartiality, by 'performing objectivity.' We have described this problem as newsrooms practicing objectivity by acting as an umpire between two opposing sides when they need to act as a scientist, researching and examining the evidence and drawing conclusions based on facts. See To Boldly Go Where No Journalist Has Gone Before or almost any blog posts under False Balance or try Framing.

Yet the problem persists, especially at the New York Times where today, the headline "Republicans on House Intelligence Panel Absolve Trump Campaign in Russian Meddling", a work in classic NYT false balance notes "... strikingly divergent conclusions closed a chapter for a congressional committee that, while charged with oversight of American spy agencies, has fractured into warring factions that often seemed to see the advancement of political agendas as their primary mission."[emphasis added]

There it is. Always at the NYT, not matter what happens, the intractable working premise is that American politics consists of two equal and opposing sides that can always accurately be equated in their actions. In this case, if Republican behavior is commitment to their political agenda, then opposition by Democrats to that behavior is automatically the exact same phenomenon - commitment to political agenda. Even if it isn't. And even when the slow drip, drip, drip continues with a companion headline in NYT just above it today! - Russian Lawyer Had Closer Ties to Kremlin Than She Let On.

Dmitry Serebryakov/Associated Press

We wouldn't have wanted the House panel to investigate that, now would we?
With Veselnitskaya shown above, Michael Cohen, and Rudy Giuliani, more to come on the role of lawyers in furthering obfuscation.