the failure of establishment media groupthink
from Thomas Frank in the Guardian....
The truth is that the unanimous anti-Trumpness of the respectable press is just one facet of a larger homogeneity. As it happens, the surviving press in this country is unanimous about all sorts of things.
There are their views on trade. Or their views on what they call “populism”. Or their views on what they call “bipartisanship”. Or their views on just about anything having to do with the decline of manufacturing (sad but inevitable) and the rise of the “creative” white-collar professions (the smart ones, so meritorious).
This is one of the factors that explains the many monstrous journalism failures of the last few decades: the dot-com bubble, which was actively cheered on by the business press; the Iraq war, which was abetted by journalism’s greatest sages; the almost complete failure to notice the epidemic of professional misconduct that made possible the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of Donald Trump, which (despite the media’s morbid fascination with the man) caught nearly everyone flatfooted.
Everything they do, they do as a herd – even when it’s running headlong over a cliff.
They still cannot suppress their admiration for bankers. Just the other week, for example, the New York Times’s Dealbook section could be found marveling at how one of the senior officers of Goldman Sachs (“possibly the most powerful investment bank in the world”) likes to DJ in his spare time.
They are endless suckers for credentialing, especially of the foreign policy variety. Last Friday, the Washington Post ran a profile of Hillary Clinton’s former foreign policy adviser, whom they caught up with giving a talk at Yale, his alma mater.
The paper told how the adviser “ran through a list of his early mentors”, including eminent personages from Brookings, the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations, and then turned to the inevitable matter of Clinton’s loss, a subject so bittersweet you could almost see the tears streaming down readers’ faces as they were prompted to recall, yet again, the ingratitude of a nation that had rejected her team of brilliants for the buffoon Trump.
Similar examples could be piled up by the dozens, if not the thousands. The American news media’s respect for tech CEOs and foreign-policy experts are the photographic negative of their overwhelming contempt for Dumb Donald.
These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.
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But, hey, let's party!
http://nypost.com/2017/07/10/why-ordi...
The truth is that the unanimous anti-Trumpness of the respectable press is just one facet of a larger homogeneity. As it happens, the surviving press in this country is unanimous about all sorts of things.
There are their views on trade. Or their views on what they call “populism”. Or their views on what they call “bipartisanship”. Or their views on just about anything having to do with the decline of manufacturing (sad but inevitable) and the rise of the “creative” white-collar professions (the smart ones, so meritorious).
This is one of the factors that explains the many monstrous journalism failures of the last few decades: the dot-com bubble, which was actively cheered on by the business press; the Iraq war, which was abetted by journalism’s greatest sages; the almost complete failure to notice the epidemic of professional misconduct that made possible the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of Donald Trump, which (despite the media’s morbid fascination with the man) caught nearly everyone flatfooted.
Everything they do, they do as a herd – even when it’s running headlong over a cliff.
They still cannot suppress their admiration for bankers. Just the other week, for example, the New York Times’s Dealbook section could be found marveling at how one of the senior officers of Goldman Sachs (“possibly the most powerful investment bank in the world”) likes to DJ in his spare time.
They are endless suckers for credentialing, especially of the foreign policy variety. Last Friday, the Washington Post ran a profile of Hillary Clinton’s former foreign policy adviser, whom they caught up with giving a talk at Yale, his alma mater.
The paper told how the adviser “ran through a list of his early mentors”, including eminent personages from Brookings, the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations, and then turned to the inevitable matter of Clinton’s loss, a subject so bittersweet you could almost see the tears streaming down readers’ faces as they were prompted to recall, yet again, the ingratitude of a nation that had rejected her team of brilliants for the buffoon Trump.
Similar examples could be piled up by the dozens, if not the thousands. The American news media’s respect for tech CEOs and foreign-policy experts are the photographic negative of their overwhelming contempt for Dumb Donald.
These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.
-----------
But, hey, let's party!
http://nypost.com/2017/07/10/why-ordi...
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