After a month of being insulted morning, noon and night by the American press, President Donald J. Trump celebrated his first month in office by holding a press conference in which he gave back as good as he got. \u00a0The press scurried to their word processors to report that the President raved, railed and ranted out of control, exactly as he — very much in control — predicted they would do during the conference. He then elected to skip the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner, which (for no reason clear to me) was also headline news evidence of his going off the tracks.<\/p>\n
What this portends, according to the press, is that freedom of the press is about to perish. \u00a0“Journalists Should Be Terrified<\/a>,” shrieked a Slate.com\u00a0headline. \u00a0“Trump Is A Threat To Press Freedom,<\/a>” moaned the Chairman of the Committee To Protect Journalists. 1984<\/em>, zipping to the top of the Amazon fiction bestseller list has become the guidebook to the era. That quintessence of totalitarianism can “Decode Trump’s First 100 Days,” <\/a>opined CNN.<\/p>\n Now the casual observer might note that Trump has done exactly nothing whatever to curb the freedom of the press. \u00a0Zero. \u00a0Nada. Nonetheless, the notion is spreading like rumors of Ebola that the press and media are experiencing an Orwellian crackdown and that freedom of speech is guttering out like a flame underneath the storm of Trumpian oppression.<\/p>\n Is it?<\/p>\n Are the press and public really both living in the same universe? \u00a0Have we the people missed something, or has this “oppressed” press and media not been beating the living tar out of Donald Trump and everyone associated with him, day and night, 24\/7, since the day he announced?<\/p>\n I have never seen<\/em> the press, not even during Watergate, so continually and relentlessly lash into a politician, or do it with a more blatant display of unabashed contempt and smug impunity.\u00a0 You literally cannot pick up a paper without an anti-Trump tirade, headline, comment, or opinion piece. \u00a0In the course of the traditional Presidential “Honeymoon Period,” the papers have called his wife a hooker, his son Barron autistic, declared his administration\u00a0collapsing even before its heads have been announced, and judged Trump himself mentally and morally unfit. \u00a0The joke about Presidential assassination from Ross Douthat of the Times <\/i>was precursor to\u00a0a raging stream of social media death threats and further calls for violent assassination, some by members of the press. The week before the election seventeen women came out accusing Trump of pawing or raping them and all the papers ran with it, supporting evidence or no; the Post ran a full-page cover of Trump’s face with the caption “CHILD MOLESTER!” \u00a0The day after, all the accusers vanished or retracted.\u00a0 Press follow-up on the accusers?\u00a0 Zero. Buzzfeed even ran stories it admitted<\/i> had no supporting evidence or foundation about Trump paying Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed once occupied by Obama.\u00a0 They ran them anyway!<\/p>\n Is this the picture of\u00a0an ‘oppressed’<\/i> press?\u00a0 An oppressive<\/i> press, yes.\u00a0 A press that thinks it can target anyone it wishes and print or say or anything it damn well pleases, true or false, with total immunity from governmental prosecution.\u00a0 But surely the last<\/i> thing it is is a press that is under any kind of constraints, or fear of constraints.\u00a0 When a newspaper editor under Lincoln criticized his policies, he was jailed.\u00a0 When a journalist attacked Stalin he went to the Gulag.\u00a0 When Bill Maher gives Trump the finger on TV, or Shields and Brooks say on PBS, “We are<\/i> the opposition party,” they become culture heroes and end up on the Tonight Show.<\/p>\n Whatever else the press may be — and “irresponsible to the point of pathology” would not be a bad characterization — clearly no one is keeping them from saying whatever they want, and equally clearly they have no real fear or apprehension that anyone will stop them.\u00a0 Far from being oppressed, they almost seem begging<\/i> for some oppression, so that they can play the part of victim in a drama that is occurring nowhere except in their own heads.<\/p>\n What is Trump doing about it?\u00a0 Nothing.\u00a0 They’re calling him names every moment. \u00a0Every once in a while he calls them names right back.\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 Harry Truman called the press some colorful names too.\u00a0 One may regret Trump’s occasional wallowing in the same trough as the press, but this isn’t any restriction of speech: \u00a0it’s a demonstration of it.\u00a0 I know the press is screaming about impending political darkness, but stop looking at things from the angle of what they’re saying<\/i> and look at what is actually happening<\/i>: \u00a0what is happening<\/i> is not a constrained press, but a press that has thrown off all constraint and is saying whatever it damned well pleases.\u00a0 Whatever else you may call this, it isn’t curtailment of freedom of the press.\u00a0 It’s freedom of the press gone thermonuclear.<\/p>\n This does not mean that the press actually is <\/i>free.\u00a0 Any journalist wishing to test that theory can simply deploy the “N” word and bid his career farewell. It’s merely a press free from government oppression. \u00a0Yet something genuinely weird is going on, something so weird there is no easy explanation for it.\u00a0 A few months before the election I checked some sources to find out how many papers supported Trump and how many Clinton. \u00a0it turned out that out of 1,937 American newspapers, only one <\/i>supported Trump — and that\u00a0<\/i>one was owned by his son-in-law.<\/p>\n Well, it just is not possible for every last paper in the country but one to support one single candidate; not when half the electorate supports the other. Especially not when the newspaper business is in fiscal crisis, and that half of the electorate is their customer base.\u00a0 That’s fiscal suicide. \u00a0Universal <\/i>coordination of opinion in defiance of <\/i>corporate\u00a0<\/i>profit is positively Soviet.\u00a0 And since this is not the Soviet Union, and I don’t believe in any sort of conspiratorial hand, this monolithic unity stumps me.\u00a0 But clearly it has nothing to do with government oppression coming from Trump when it’s overwhelmingly directed against him.<\/p>\n Yet even so we may well be witnessing the twilight of the press. Certainly\u00a0the mainstream media is heading for a major fall.\u00a0 That fall has nothing to do with Trump, though he is, as always, using the development cannily.\u00a0 It has to do with the rise of alternative media. Yes, the Times\u00a0<\/i>has a million subscribers. \u00a0But\u00a0Breitbart <\/i>has over 200 million pageviews a month.\u00a0 Who do you think gets more readership?\u00a0 And — since Breitbart<\/a> is in many ways the creation of Steve Bannon — do we really imagine Trump is going to shut it down?<\/p>\n While the traditional media owned by the six leading conglomerates loath Trump to a man, the internet- and Youtube- and podcast-driven\u00a0independent\u00a0<\/i>media, from Drudge to Zero Hedge to Stefan Molyneux to Infowars, are taking over a vast and ever-increasing amount of readership market share.\u00a0 We may lament at the quality of some of the alternatives, but they are by no means all curios of the alt-right. Znet<\/a> and Jacobin<\/a> are part of the scene on the left and by no means lacking in substance.<\/p>\n These new media<\/i> are nothing if not alive, vivid, and (unlike mainstream media) open to a wide variety of voices from left, right, and every other direction.\u00a0 Not only is this emerging news media genuinely (or at least relatively) independent, they’re part of a system virtually impervious to Trump or any other President. \u00a0The internet was designed to allow communications in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and generations of hackers since have raised getting around government interference to an art form. What government does not<\/em> want to see Julian Assange’s head roll?\u00a0 But Wikileaks<\/a> publishes in blithe disregard of them all. \u00a0Let us take some comfort from this: \u00a0the mainstream media could vanish tomorrow, and news and discussion outside government control would still flourish.<\/p>\n But the mainstream media won’t go away.\u00a0 And Trump doesn’t want them to, for he plays them like a Isaac Stern plays a Stradivarius.\u00a0 He likes hearing them scream, and provokes it.\u00a0 It shows the public that he’s an outsider, that the Establishment hates him. \u00a0It reassures them that negative news about him is probably slanted and fake. \u00a0It distracts. \u00a0If he wants to draw press attention away from some political machination, he’ll just muse aloud as to why Megyn Kelly really has no boobs to speak of, and the press will yowl “Sexist Pig!” for weeks on end, obliterating all other news stories, but still putting Trump’s face in front of the screen morning till night.<\/p>\n Shutting the press down would look bad even if it were possible. \u00a0But using the press and making fools out of them is entertaining, gets him plenty of free screen time, and pays off with the voters.\u00a0 It’s not a serious confrontation, it’s a Kabuki performance: \u00a0Trump the embattled Man of the People versus the Lying Press.\u00a0 He’s not going to throw that away.\u00a0 It’s too useful, and he enjoys it too much.<\/p>\n So should we fear the death of the press as we know it? Alas,<\/em> no. \u00a0The press is not having its freedom threatened — on the contrary, it’s never been or acted more freely.\u00a0 Trump has no reason whatever to shut it down, and plenty of reason to keep playing it like a fiddle.\u00a0 Alternative news sources are all over the place, and uniquely impervious to government crackdown.\u00a0 One barely even needs the news at all in an environment where smartphones surround and livestream every news events in real time. Log on and see it happening! <\/p>\n Soviet style control isn’t coming; if anything, one could make a better case that it’s already here and is on the way out. \u00a0Will the traditional mainstream media survive as is<\/em>? \u00a0In the long term, probably not.<\/p>\n But that is not a tragedy: \u00a0it’s an opportunity.<\/p>\n What then should we do? Close up the papers, turn off the TV off, boot up the iPad. \u00a04chan<\/a>, Drudge<\/a>, Unz<\/a>, Connorpost<\/a>, RT<\/a>, RealClearPolitics<\/a> — there’s a wealth of news sources out there, and simply no way to shut them down.<\/p>\n Relax.\u00a0 Explore.\u00a0 Enjoy.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a month of being insulted morning, noon and night by the American press, President Donald J. Trump celebrated his first month in office by holding a press conference in which he gave back as good as he got. \u00a0The press scurried to their word processors to report that the President raved, railed and ranted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n