A Fatal Mistake: Mainstream Media Turned On Trump Way Too Late
I'm glad they're now starting to skewer him and check him. Why didn't they care in 2015?
Lately, I’ve been feeling a strange pang of rage when I look at newspapers and television shows related to Trump. It’s not because the mainstream media newscasters are propping up the fat sack of crap. Rather, it’s because they’re actually calling him out.
For a while, I couldn’t understand why I was feeling this way. It was only when my friend pointed out that the media started to turn on him that it all clicked. I, like so many others, was furious at the insincerity of our media.
It’s great that newscasters are starting to call out Republicans for the damage they did to America. It’s wonderful. My question is, why didn’t they care enough to do the right thing before the orange fuck ended up in office?
In 2015 and 2016, the mainstream media paved a golden path for Donald Trump.
America would not be in the shitshow it is if Trump was not elected to the office. We are not talking about how much of a role mainstream media (FOX, OANN, Vice, and others) played in making that happen.
Think about it. Do you really think that people would have voted Trump in if the following wasn’t true?
The moderators of the presidential debate allowed Trump to lie on stage about a variety of things—often swaying voters in the process. Where were the aggressive fact-checking and mandatory stops before 2024? No, moderators totally butchered it. In fact, they even butchered Biden’s debate.
Newscasters kept allowing Trump to rant on the shows, even when it was clear he should have been taken off the air. Remember when news hosts first decided to yank Trump off the air? That was huge. That sends a strong signal. It’s a sign that the news agencies do not take him seriously—as they shouldn’t. Why was this not a thing in 2016? In 2020, even?
Mainstream media kept trying to validate the “both sides” arguments involving conspiracy theories up until recently. Even during COVID, FOX was still peddling Alex Jones-level garbage about vaccines being bad. FOX also straight-up lied about voting machines, leading to a lawsuit that almost buried them.
The media rarely ever shamed Donald Trump for lying about things. It was only when others started to speak up that the press could no longer ignore it.
And, speaking as someone who was in a journalistic world for ages, I don’t even want to think about how much the media covered up about Trump prior to his run. I guarantee you that people knew some rotten stuff. They just didn’t put it to paper.
Hell, I remember one Reddit thread about people who knew Trump. One contractor said that Trump didn’t pay his team and nearly bankrupted him. His allegations were later proved right by multiple lawsuits.
If a Reddit thread was able to be more reliable than news stations, what does that say about our news outlets?
The trust people used to put in mainstream media was sacred not too long ago.
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, I remember teachers telling us that we couldn’t trust anything on the internet. The only sources they told us were trustworthy were academic papers, newspapers, and professionally-published books.
Mainstream media was a pillar of our society. When we wanted to know the news, we’d turn on the TV to find out. We really, truly trusted the media with everything from advising us on what to buy to telling us the truth about current events.
One could argue that the media was always a political puppet, thanks to Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project that involved paying off news writers to discuss America in a positive light. However, that’s actually not that bad in most cases.
What is bad, though, is letting groups that don’t have the people’s best at heart buy, bribe, or even intimidate news agencies into lying. And yet, here we are. We have been duped one too many times by the mainstream media.
That sacred trust is largely broken. Our society will never have that full reliance or trust in news agencies ever again—and that’s a huge crime against our country. A healthy society lives on the same reality, has the same facts, and focuses on the truth.
We don’t have that anymore. It’s harder and harder to tell which news sources are legitimate. That’s not the viewers’ fault. Rather, it’s the fault of the CEOs and of the people who work under them.
Indie bloggers are becoming the new mainstream media.
Did you notice how many people are getting their news and research from indie vloggers, bloggers, and social media posters? It’s not shocking to hear. Many of these bloggers and vloggers make an effort to do in-depth, science-backed research on their topics.
Sadly, I can’t say the same for many news outlets.
Perhaps they rode too high on their horses because they assumed that people would continue to trust them after being burnt. News companies could deal with just telling people whatever they wanted without the research—antivaxx propaganda included.
People are sick of having to wonder whether or not they’re going to be fed more propaganda or more misinformation. They’re tired of wondering why they only get the full facts when everyone stops watching the news out of sheer frustration from all the lies.
How did this even happen?
Believe it or not, it used to be illegal to pull the shit that we’re seeing mainstream news do. The FCC introduced a regulation in 1949 called the Fairness Doctrine. This doctrine was created out of worry that news agencies could use their power to push political agendas.
The doctrine had to air contrasting views on controversial subjects, allowing both sides to explain their views in their own words. The doctrine was struck down in 1969, and several news agencies quickly found their own lean since then.
However, it goes deeper than that. In 1995, the Harvard Business Review published a piece explaining why the news is not the truth. Newspapers sell more when they bring in spicy, conflicting stories that get people talking.
The mainstream media has always loved ratcheting up drama to a 10. They do it to sell sensational stories. As paper sales waned, the media started to take in more ad revenue from shady businesses and groups to prop up their profits.
Oh, it gets worse.
Eventually, getting nifty ads wasn’t enough. Entire companies were erected to act as political propaganda machines. You might have noticed this recently with OANN or Breitbart, but there’s another larger news outlet that actually blazed that trail.
In the case of FOX News, the network was created to give a personal squawk box to Richard Nixon and the Republican Party. Its goal was to convert more people to the right-wing while circumventing mainstream media.
FOX was even called out for not actually reporting news truthfully. That’s why it’s no longer designated as a news station in many parts of the world. It’s considered to be an “entertainment” station. What’s wild is that FOX isn’t even the worst offender.
I’d wager that award goes to Sinclair Broadcasting.
If you live in the Midwest or South, you’ve seen Sinclair stations. They basically monopolized the local news. Sinclair isn’t even subtle about its propaganda anymore, despite critics raising the alarm as early as 2004.
It went whole hog in one of the last elections with a bone-chilling video showing all of its local news anchors across the company parroting the exact same script bashing “fake news” for Trump.
And we are supposed to trust major news stations now that they’re suddenly backpedaling on the past four years in hopes of us forgetting their blatant lack of integrity?
Mainstream news cleaning up its act came a bit too late for many people’s liking.
To a point, I’m not even sure if people are even aware of how much they’re reeling from the betrayal of mainstream news. It’s so abundantly obvious that news agencies are getting called out on their terrible bias against Democrats, their misinformation, and their pay-to-play.
Of course, when the criticism reaches a critical level, news agencies are going to realize they can’t do that anymore. And so, here we are, finally seeing some kind of integrity—but not really. These news agencies are just trying to backpedal now that they’ve been caught.
Right now, we need to hold news agencies accountable. There need to be laws that limit the propaganda, the hate speech, and the politicization of news. Otherwise? We’ll see them pull the same stuff over and over and over again.
And next time? Our society might not be able to survive another Trump.
I worked in newspapers for 30 years — but in community journalism. I never worked at any big media outlet. I’ve written before about the integrity of my staff when we had to deal with a mini- Trump. I don’t know why the big guys treated Trump like a reasonable person. Do you remember the little paper that wrote about Santos and was ignored?
Some of us entered the media in order to serve. Others just wanted attention. Guess which type came out on top? https://medium.com/rome-magazine/how-my-little-paper-would-have-handled-trump-bf572079887f