Something seems to be happening; the media is failing to live up to its role as the Fourth Estate. If you’ve been wondering why Donald Trump has been able to get as far as he has despite daily demonstrations that he is unfit for office, you can lay a lot of it directly at the feet of the media. Digby has a compendium of the growing awareness of how bad it has gotten.
When I first started writing online many moons ago, the issue that drove me to it was the fact that we were dealing with impeachment and a stolen election substantially because the media was putting their thumbs on the scales in our politics in ways that enabled a malevolent right wing force to take advantage. I never thought they were right wing themselves, simply that they found it easier to capitulate to the right's pressures and were far too willing to chase the narratives the right helpfully provided for them. This helped pave the way for some horrifying disasters --- the Iraq war and the financial crash among them. It has certainly prevented real progress and led to cynicism. And they simply don't seem to be able to see it. (What's even more depressing is the fact that so many people who are able to see media malpractice when it comes to government malevolence can't see it when it comes to political coverage.)
I highly recommend you bookmark the links Digby has assembled for future reference. As the person who gave us Cokie’s Law, she has an eye for this kind of thing. Read The Whole Thing— and then check out the links.
• James Fellows — the latest in what is apparently a series that’s horrifying in its totality. Even more links there.
• Paul Krugman— also referenced here.
• Josh Marshall— has a particularly egregious example of press non-coverage of a real scandal. (Also see Paul Waldman— h/t to teacherken)
Let me add some more:
• Charles P. Pierce— press coverage of a scandal that isn’t.
• Kevin Drum— dissecting the e-mail story here, here and here, with more to come. Also this.
One more from Digby
• This one is a big one: The Clinton Rules, Jonathan Allen. These are important enough that I’ll grab the headers, but Read The Whole Thing for the full context.
1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the "vast right-wing conspiracy," and mainstream media outlets
2) Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.
3) The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.
4) Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America's royal family
5) Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit
Allen listed the above rules some months back. Since Clinton and Trump secured their respective nominations, it has gotten worse if anything.
One of the reasons behind the founding of Daily Kos, IIRC, was in part to address media failures to cover certain stories adequately, media limitations on what was considered ‘legitimate’… and outright bias. It used to be enough to dismiss FOX, talk radio, and right wing tabloids; the lame stream media was not great but tolerable most of the time. Not so much now.
For the final link, I give you this Mark Sumner piece from the Kos front page that appeared while I was putting this together: Political reporters and a critical story of transient tussis. No comment necessary.
UPDATE: Tom Sullivan over at Digby’s place has picked up on more stories of asymmetric media treatment of Trump versus Clinton, including Josh Marshall’s Pam Bondi story and Paul Waldman’s list of scandals among others. As Sullivan concludes,
When will the press finally stop "raising questions" for which the only answer is more innuendo and quit fixating on the "optics" of whatever it is alleged Hillary Clinton didn't do (that she should have known better not to look like she did when she didn't) and actually squeeze out some balance with their balance? In "working the refs," conservatives like to hammer on the fact that members of the press tend to lean left. They have trained the press to counter those accusations with closer scrutiny of Democrats' appearances of improprieties than Republicans'. But there is another dynamic at work, born of the same leftish skew among members of the press. We expect our own to adhere to a higher standard than conservatives. We don't expect the right to live up to those standards, and they don't disappoint us when they don't. But when appearances (even false media ones) suggest people like the Clintons have fallen short, we're on a hair trigger for throwing them under the bus. Dirty tricksters on the right know this and exploit it as a weakness. And like George McFly, we keep falling for it.
UPDATE 2: Kevin Drum (see links above) has summarized the Clinton email story. The only real scandal is the way the media has allowed the right wing to turn it into a scandal. READ THE WHOLE THING — but here’s Drum’s conclusion after going through it all:
When you put all this together, it leads to an obvious conclusion: Hillary Clinton did want to protect her emails from FOIA, but the emails she was concerned about were her personal emails. Unfortunately, her initial decision to use only a single email account—probably because she was technically illiterate and simply didn't understand why this was such a bad idea—turned everything into a circus. Before turning her records over to State, she had to carefully pull out all the personal emails and then make it clear that she wanted them deleted so they could never, ever be retrieved. Her experience led her to believe that personal or not, if they were somehow accessible they would be subpoenaed and leaked and everyone would go bananas over them.
Drum spells out why he thinks this is most reasonable explanation. It makes far more sense than all the other alleged motives out there, given how much of the Clinton’s personal life has been dragged through the media and the fever swamps of the right wing. Drum also explains why the so-called Bill Clinton $18 million ‘favor’ is a nothing burger, and the Trump smoking gun the press is largely ignoring.