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The Media That Cried “Wolf!”
Aesop is said to have been an ancient Greek storyteller, perhaps a slave, whose stories of wisdom were collected and passed down through the ages. None is more famous than “The Boy That Cried Wolf.” For those too young to have been taught the fables in public school, it’s a short and simple tale: A young shepherd boy is tending a flock by himself for the first time. He is instructed by his elders to cry out should a wolf arrive and threaten the sheep. Two or three times, the boy falsely sounds the alarm and three times the elders show up in a panic. The boy laughs and thinks it is great sport. When the wolf finally does come, he screams to no avail, no one shows and the boy himself is eventually devoured.
The analogy with today’s press corps virtually writes itself. For almost a quarter of a century, the media has worked hand-in-glove with the Democratic Party to try to destroy the character of a succession of Republican presidential candidates. To steal one of their own phrases, it became so common place it was “normalized.” So, in 2016 as the late presidential campaign heated up and the charges against Trump were trotted out like clockwork, huge swaths of the nation simply yawned. The press cried, and screamed, and stamped their feet and pleaded that this time was different; this time they actually meant it.
But it wasn’t enough.
In May of 2016, David Samuels wrote a huge puff piece for The New York Times about Ben Rhodes, then President Barack Obama’s “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.” It followed Rhodes as he sold the Iranian Nuclear deal on a bed of lies and, in his words, in “the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this” and manipulate “the echo chamber.”
Investor’s Business Daily distilled one of the major lies thusly:
While Obama, Rhodes and company were telling the public that talks with Iran only began after “moderate” leader Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013, “the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012.” In other words, the administration lied.
But Rhodes makes it clear that selling this lie to the press was easy. “The average reporters is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. … They literally know nothing.”
But what was really surprising was the reaction to the manipulation:
And what has been the mainstream media’s reaction to these blatant insults to its professional credibility? Did they erupt in fits or moral outrage at the White House for lying and manipulating them into spreading those lies, while viewing the press with utter contempt?
Hardly.
When reporters had the chance on Friday to confront Obama about the revelations contained in the Times article, they asked four questions: Three of them were about Donald Trump and one was about the ongoing safety problems with the Washington, D.C., subway system. Zero were about Ben Rhodes or Iran.
Times’ author Samuels seems mystified by how compliant the press has been, since “carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power.”
Being a free-lancer, Samuels obviously hasn’t spent much time in the Times’ editorial offices. Where did Samuels expect opposition? From CBS, where Rhodes’ brother runs the news division? Or from ABC, where Co-Chairman of Disney Media Ben Sherwood’s sister worked on nuclear arms control and ended up as assistant energy secretary? Or among any other reporters with wives, husbands, and sisters working in the Obama White House?
The media itself, which clings to the phrase “appearance of impropriety” for every nascent GOP scandal like Linus Van Pelt hugs his security blanket, bristles at the idea. “There is zero evidence, zero, that [Ben Sherwood’s relationship] has had any impact on our coverage,” Jeffrey Schneider, ABC News’s chief spokesman told The Washington Post in 2013. Got that? Zero evidence. Because to find evidence, somebody would actually have to look for it.
Over the weekend Sean Spicer, Trump’s communications director, got off to a bumpy start with the White House Press Corps over a silly thing, namely the size of the crowd at Friday’s inauguration. Spicer tried to over inflate it and some outlets were caught using photos from very early in the day and comparing them to high noon pics from 2009. It was not a pretty sight or admirable performance on either side.
But the press doubled down and insisted this was groundbreaking, that never in the history of the Republic had a White House so blatantly lied. It was like the “Benghazi riots were caused by a YouTube video,” “If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan,” and the aforementioned Iran deal never existed. (Those, and the entire Nixon Administration, but that’s a totally different story.) And the press did not help themselves by breathlessly reporting changes to the White House web pages (The climate section has been removed! They’re in full denial mode!) or saying the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been whisked away from its honored spot in the Oval Office. (It had not.)
Meanwhile, the new president’s supporters, weary of the Democrat-Media Complex and decades of GOP surrender to it, cheered Spicer. David Limbaugh tweeted out:
I love that the Trump administration is pro-actively fighting back at the lying liberal media This is SO refreshing https://t.co/0JBxXEufJe
— David Limbaugh (@DavidLimbaugh) January 22, 2017
What this means is that we may indeed have entered a new era of liars covering liars and both sides hiding behind a phalanx of supporters whose confirmation biases will allow them to believe anything. It didn’t have to be that way, either. The press destroyed its own credibility with shameful behavior over the last eight years. It was they who drove their own approval ratings into the low 30’s months before Trump won the White House.
There is one individual who couldn’t be happier, though. The wolf.
Published in Journalism
I had plenty of schadenfreude despite Spicer’s hyperbole.
Yep. Now, who is the wolf in this case? Russia? Iran? Someone else?
If we only knew. Campaigns and the reality of governing always collide. Nothing George W. Bush and Al Gore campaigned on in 2000 prepared the country for September 11, 2001.
The media always excuses themselves with instant indulgences. The reporter that made up the story about he MLK bust ‘apologized’, with no recognition of the clever selection of “MLK” and secure in the knowledge that retractions have few legs compared to the charge.
That Trump supporters are viewing this as sport rather than truth seeking is the new normal..
It is the world we live in. All media is incorrect and lying for another agenda as the going in assumption. Unless they provide corroboration from two sources with any report, they are not telling the truth.
I blame Trump for winning the election and threatening their undeserved power.
I think anger at being lied to so much for so long by so many feeds this.
Please allow me to introduce myself ………
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBecM3CQVD8
The new paradigm seems to be, you have your agenda, and we have ours.
I think it’s a great strategy. Open contempt. Continual reminders of what they don’t report, what they won’t focus on.
Witness:
https://youtu.be/0s2CaQCZGUM
The Women Who Cried ‘Wolf’ …
Indeed! And still, it was the press that doubled down. “There you (DNC-run media) go again”. They spend almost 14 minutes harassing KellyAnne Conway about something silly. Rich Lowry even calls it stupid (it is).
The press illustrates their idiotic ‘priority’ by not just letting go of this stupid story. It is their fault. As KellyAnne Conway clearly pointed out, their obsession with getting Trump is their “news” and they are continuing to ignore the problems and challenges of the Country and its people. They refuse to just cover the news straight up. Which is more important news … CrowdGate … or Benghazi, Iran or Obamacare?
The press loses. Again.
I worry that this means the Trump Admin will fight on losing hills. I hope I am wrong, but it would be in character. Maybe it won’t happen too often.
Only 8 years? I think its more than that; at least 20.
I think the left is losing it because of the metanarrative. They picked a fight with ill intent – that part is obvious. They may be technically correct, I have no way of knowing.
The actual number of the people in the crowds was never really the point was it? That’s why this won’t hurt Trump and will hurt the media.
While the left is talking about crowd numbers, liberals just shot a guy at a conservative speech.
More detail, s’il vous plait, Monsieur?
In the movie, Broadcast News, the brilliant but nerdy reporter, Aaron Altman, describes the handsome and yet empty-headed on-air anchor as the Devil.
“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail… He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing… he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important.”
The writer and director of this movie had journalism pegged decades ago.
It’s like the bruhaha over Trump refusing CNN’s shouted questions at a recent presser and then CNN reporting on it for days. The media still can’t come to terms with the fact that NO ONE FEELS SORRY FOR THEM. The irony of now insisting their impartiality is a mainstay to the Republic after the last 8 years is laughable…..but they don’t even get the joke.
It doesn’t really feel like a “pick your battles wisely” type of operation, does it?
May we expect this focus to change as the Trump Administration makes substantive newsworthy moves to give the country back to the people?
http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/22/milo-protester-shoots-suspected-conservative-no-charges-after-he-points-to-racism/
Apparently I quoted The wrong post
I don’t get the press conference about crowd size one bit. I guess they just feel so maligned by the press that if they say the sky is blue, Trump’s people will say it’s red?
Still kind of hilarious that it’s still in the news today. Who cares?????
And that is part of the point. Trump seems to be a master at distracting with the small stuff as he rams through the big stuff. We’ll see for sure during the coming weeks. But the news media are bigger narcissists than Trump could ever dream of being. So, he keeps making the story about them, and they bite, hook, line, and sinker, baby.
This is how he won the election. Hillary didn’t think Trump had any chance. Why? Distraction. If he does this stuff as he is pushing through a massive legislative and executive agenda, nobody who doesn’t pay attention will know about the real work that is getting done.
The Democrats, by the way, have been doing this for years. Have a scandal coming out? Better bomb an aspirin factory. Distraction works all too well in the short term, and sometimes in the long-term, too.
It’s going to be an exciting four years.
It might be a ridiculous thing to dig in on crowd size, but when the media’s intent was to demoralize Trump’s voters (people the media has consistently demoralized by reporting their numbers as insignificant as TEA partiers, or depressed white men, or the unemployed and under employed [job numbers, anyone?]), I am, quite frankly, unperturbed by a morale-building exaggeration that counters an unfair representation of Trump’s voters (that photo).
I, personally, don’t think this is about Trump’s ego. And the media is just as complicit in focusing on something so stupid. Kellyanne wins, btw.
You forgot the last line of this speech: “And he’ll get all the great women.”
Don’t forget the way the mainstream media (somehow, this phrase always makes me think of a clean midstream catch of urine, not the least because that concept on examination turned out to be an
old wives’ taleold doctors’ taleunexamined but widely held belief) systematically understated the crowd numbers at Trump’s rallies.I guarantee you that just about every person who went to a Trump rally paid attention to the media coverage of the one they went to, and probably of others as well. Don’t forget that there are two main groups of people who read car reviews: Those who are shopping for cars, and those who have recently bought one; they mainly keep reading reviews of the model they bought.
Journalistic malpractice in reporting those rallies means that hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, across the country know in their guts that broadcast and print media outlets will lie to advance an agenda.
The Left is mostly fine with that, it’s their agenda.
Was it a Clockwork Orange?
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
My comment is somewhat related, and it is this: I like it that our guy won, don’t get me wrong, but to me, the very best thing about this election was the absolute PROOF that the media and the DNC have been working hand-in-hand for many years. Yes, we all “knew” it to be true since long before Dan Rather tried to throw the 2004 election by claiming blatantly false documents were real, since long before the media played the “read my lips” tape daily for the entire 1992 campaign, and so on, but we had nothing we could point to and say, “see? they are in bed with the Democrats!”
Now we have that proof, and they cannot deny it, so they no longer try. They are free to bash Republicans 24/7 with glee..
For a while over the summer, I probably irritated everyone around me because my favorite catch-phrase was “Get this to Tapper!”
The late Michael Crichton attacked this very subject a decade ago in a speech called, “Why Speculate?”
Isn’t this why the Left suddenly got so agitated at the Russians doing what their normally do, spying, but this time they revealed some of what they found and it showed the trio, the Left, the DNC, and the media as a team, and a crooked one at that? People will now pay more attention to alternative media for alternative facts.
What if Trump is the Wolf?
In other words: what if he really does do something seriously inappropriate, and the Media shrieks (per usual) . . . but we ignore them, because of their history of hair-on-fire shriekiness?
Just playing Devil’s Advocate.
The media pundits talk about “political capital” all the time without realizing they have it, too. They’ve squandered a fortune.
At first, they should fight everything. Be feisty, loud and indignant. Eventually the press will learn to back off. A good first step would be to ban the rude CNN reporter from the WH.