What happens when news organizations become entertainment divisions.
Michael Goodwin nailed it this morning.
"In the sixth month of Donald Trump’s presidency, we are witnessing an unprecedented meltdown of much of the media." More:Standards have been tossed overboard in a frenzy to bring down the president.
Trump, like all presidents, deserves coverage that is skeptical and tough, but also fair. That’s not what he’s getting.
What started as bias against him has become a cancer that is consuming the best and brightest. In rough biblical justice, media attempts to destroy the president are boomeranging and leaving their reputations in tatters.
He accuses them of publishing fake news, and they respond with such blind hatred that they end up publishing fake news. That’ll show him.
CNN is suffering an especially bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, even trying to make a virtue of its hostility to the president. In doing so, executives conveniently confuse animus with professional skepticism, and cite growing audiences as proof of their good judgment.
The bottom line matters, and there is certainly an audience for hating Trump all the time. But facts and fairness separate major news organizations from any other business looking to make a buck, and a commitment to them creates credibility and public trust.
For a news organization, trust is its only true capital -- which is accumulated with difficulty and squandered easily.
However, it seems clear that CNN's management and on-air talent ("journalists" feels like too strong a word) are now in the entertainment business. If that's the case, then getting the facts straight doesn't matter nearly as much as providing televised thrills for their progressive viewers. Similar behavior cost CBS's Scott Pelley his Evening News anchor desk, yet he doesn't seem to understand why. That Pelley still enjoys a lofty perch at 60 Minutes indicates CBS News doesn't really understand what's wrong, either.
But our news-ish media aren't the only American institution indulging in self-destructive decadence. That kind of behavior is becoming common, even in our appeals courts, as Michael Barone noted:
Adult supervision: that’s what the Supreme Court provided for a federal judiciary, or part thereof, run amok, when it issued its unanimous opinion overturning the preliminary injunctions of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning entry of persons from six countries — the so-called travel ban. The court’s unsigned per curiam opinion brushes aside, with virtually no comment, the argument of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that the executive order violated the Constitution’s bar of an establishment of religion and the assertion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that its judgment on national security was better than the president’s. Glenn Reynolds commented on Barone's piece, " Trump’s presidency has shown that neutral professionalism is largely a myth. This will do long-term damage to the professional classes."
And as Glenn himself might add: Indeed. |
