By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Dear Mainstream Media and Democrats: It’s your turn. Now
that Donald Trump has been formally nominated, the formal responsibility to
stop him passes from the Right to the Left, from Republicans to Democrats and
the journalists who amplify their values.
You’re going to find it a very tough slog. And it’s your
own damn fault.
During the primaries, the task of exposing the true
nature of the Trump takeover fell disproportionately to a few conservative
magazines, columnists, renegade radio hosts, and behind-the-scenes activists.
We all failed. There will be plenty of time for recriminations and “we happy
few” speeches later. (If you detect a note of bitterness on my part, I’m not
being clear enough: I contain symphonies of bitterness.)
We failed in part because the mainstream media were
having too good of a time to help. Last spring, Stop Trump operatives told me
they brought damning stories to mainstream outlets. The response was usually:
“We’re not interested in covering that — right now.”
By May, Trump had already received roughly $3 billion
worth of free media, thanks to ratings-hungry TV networks. CBS chief Les
Moonves summarized it well at an investor conference in February: Trump’s rise
“may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Many in the media were so willing to put clicks and
ratings before country because the conventional wisdom was that Trump would
fade or implode eventually. Why not gawk at the spectacle? And if Trump did get
the nomination, many journalists calculated, all the better. What fun it will
be to watch Hillary Clinton destroy Trump and Trump destroy the GOP.
Only slowly have the media come around to the realization
that Trump is an actual threat, but now it may be too late because they have a
serious “cry wolf” problem. Millions of Americans firmly believe that
journalists are water carriers for the Democrats and will tune out much of what
they have to say about Trump now that he’s the nominee.
You can start the timeline as far back as the World War
II era. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt told the country that if Republicans were
returned to power, “even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the
battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at
home.” The press nodded along.
In 1964, CBS News’s Daniel Schorr claimed that Barry
Goldwater’s planned post-convention vacation in Europe was really an effort to
coordinate with “right-wing Germans” in “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.”
In recent years, as the distinctions between news and
opinion, analysis and advocacy, reporting and click-baiting has blurred, the
problem has only gotten worse.
Every election cycle, the GOP nominee is smeared as a
racist by the Democrats or the press — or both. Representative John Lewis of
Georgia trades in a bit more of his hard-earned moral authority each time he
insinuates that the GOP nominee is like George Wallace or wants to bring back
Jim Crow, and political columnists relinquish a bit more of their claim to
objectivity each time they let his comments pass without condemnation or
criticism.
George W. Bush revived for the Left the paranoid style in
American politics, and if you google “John McCain, racist, 2008” you’ll see he
was lazily demonized too.
In 2012, pundits said Paul Ryan wanted to throw old
ladies over cliffs because he wanted to reform Social Security. When Mitt
Romney spoke to the NAACP, the response from many in the media was, per usual,
“Racist!” (It’s ironic that many of the notable Republicans rebuking Trump this
year are the ones pundits were only too happy to paint as racist not long ago.)
I have no doubt many journalists would defend their
smears and professional failures, but that doesn’t change the fact that many
Americans outside the mainstream media/Democratic bubble find it all
indefensible. More important, they find it all ignorable — because the race
card and the demagogue card have been played and replayed so often they’re
little more than scraps of lint.
Already, editorial boards are preparing their indictments
of what they believe to be Donald Trump’s incompetence, bigotry, and
authoritarianism. Trump operatives will undoubtedly respond: “That’s what they
always say about Republicans.” And they’ll be right.
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