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Thursday’s Coordinated Editorials Are Profoundly Misguided
On Thursday, in newspapers across the country, a coordinated message is being sent about the hostility of the Trump administration against the press. CNN’s Brian Stelter has been talking on the story for days, and reported,
About 350 newspapers will all have one thing in common on Thursday: A statement supporting the free press and decrying President Trump’s attacks against the media.
From The Martha’s Vineyard Times to the Dallas Morning News… from the Yankton County Observer in South Dakota to the Bangor Daily News in Maine… the papers will all run editorials as part of an effort first proposed by the Boston Globe earlier this month.
Marjorie Pritchard, the Globe’s deputy editorial page editor, told CNN that more papers were still “signing on” for the effort as of Wednesday afternoon.
Each paper is writing its own editorial. “This whole project is not anti-Trump. It’s really pro-press,” The Globe’s version says.
The press is one of the most hated institutions in America; losing trust with every survey given to the American people about their opinions of various institutions in our country. Trump didn’t start the fire, he’s merely stoking it and warming his hands on it.
What, exactly, is the point of a “pro-press” editorial? It preaches to a choir of individuals who view the press as firefighters; and for the rest, well, it will go mostly unnoticed.
For a significant portion of Americans, however, this campaign with a message clearly aimed at the President has one effect: It shows the level of coordination taking place in newsrooms across the country, and just how much coordination of messaging is possible. The same media that continues to deny the fact that it has a bias, and that it isn’t monolithically against Donald J. Trump, then coordinated a massive effort to align its editorial messaging against the President. It reaffirms every negative perception many Americans have about the media; far from engendering support, it will likely have the opposite effect.
Published in General
I think this is also true of Republican anti-Trump efforts, or any scenario that pits Trump in opposition to “the establishment,” “the swamp,” “the elites,” etc. The more “they” attack or undermine him, the more protective the pro-Trump faction becomes.
The lady has class . . .
The press hates Trump because Trump promised us lower taxes, less regulations, a better economy, a crackdown on illegal immigration, and an end to Obamacare. They hate Trump because he has made good progress on these goals. They hate Trump because Trump has our back. They hate Trump because they hate us, the people who support conservative policies and oppose liberal policies.
When Trump says that the press is the enemy of the people he means his people — us. He’s right.
But local news is dying ! We have to save local news !
(sarcasm alert)
If I’m not mistaken, didn’t Trump say fake news makes the press an enemy of the people? Something like that?
Perhaps they should focus more energy on local news then. Unless the paper is based on Washington D.C. or the President is actually visiting the area, Trump ain’t local news.
The media was busy bashing Trump, while Trump was busy bringing China to its knees…and the negotiating table.
For the Boston Globe to be spearheading this drive to supposedly protect freedom of the press is laughable. So glad this columnist wrote this story today.
Thank you for information/clarification. I wouldn’t want to deny Mr. Shapiro credit for the term. He’s a sharp intellect.
It was The Atlantic, wasn’t it?
Interestingly (actually, not) it appears that ‘performance journalism’ might be a technical term in journalism studies. (Although with a slightly different meaning.)
I’ve been looking for a place to post this that just came over the transom.
“I’ve met a lot of vile human beings in my life, from dictators and terrorists to sex abusers and wicked conmen,” Morgan (Piers) wrote in a piece for the DailyMail on Tuesday, February 13. “But I’ve never met anyone quite so relentlessly loathsome as Omarosa; a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work.”
I had to read the article. Wow. It would be something if Morgan had recordings of her saying those nasty things to him . . .
Not that Piers Morgan is a paragon of virtue.
He sure is. Along with 2 or 3 Podcasts on Ricochet, I try not to miss his podcasts.
I’m glad I could help.
That’s a very interesting article. I wonder if anybody’s done an empirical analysis of the partisan/ideological leanings of all the newspapers that have closed down since the 1960s.
Up here in the Great White North the federal government had a royal commission back in 1980 to study the “problem” of “media concentration” as newspapers were starting to close and/or merge.
As a Communications Studies major, we had to study that commission in class. I don’t recall anybody mentioning the political leanings of the newspapers that folded compared to the ones that survived. Did Tory papers fold at a greater rate than Liberal papers?
Fake news is the method. The motivation is politics.