Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Saturday, January 14th, 2017

The Trump Story the Media Dare Not Utter

Author:     Thom Hartmann
Source:     Alternet (U.S.)
Publication Date:     January 11, 2017
 Link: The Trump Story the Media Dare Not Utter
Stephan:   Thom Hartmann is dead on. He sees what is happening to the media clearly, and I have chosen this essay because I am very much in accord with what it says. The Media Trend is a very big deal, and not discussed nearly enough.  Six corporations control 90% of the media in America, and they have profit as their first priority, constrained to varying degrees by cultural norms of fairness. And yet at the same time with the internet more and more people are posting public information. One effect of this is the rise of the power of false news. Credibility can no longer be be taken for granted. I think we are going through a change equivalent to  the Gutenberg Bible printing in 1455, which demonstrated movable type printing. A paradigm change is coming.

Television control room
Credit: henryehooper.wordpress.com

The media are engaged in an orgy of navel-gazing about the Trump presidency, but they’re totally, utterly, absolutely, no-way-in-hell willing to gaze at their own navel.

Did Russian hackers revealing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile had put their thumb on the scale over at the DNC against Bernie cause Trump to win? Did he win because working white men are “angry”? Did he win because Hillary failed to campaign in the critical Rustbelt swing states? Did he win because of the Russians’ media operations? Is he going to be president because so many people are so upset with “gummint”?

These (among others) are the memes that you’ll find virtually every hour on TV news. But have you ever, anywhere (other than Free Speech TV), seen a TV conversation about the role the media itself played in getting Trump elected, and why they did it?

The numbers are easy to find online Trump got between $2 and $3 billion in free media coverage, while Hillary struggled to break into the evening news, and Bernie was largely ignored until the final […]

Read the Full Article

2 Comments

  1. Mark R on Saturday, January 14, 2017 at 8:52 am

    I respect Thom Hartmann and appreciate many good points he offers even though I don’t share his political beliefs. However, he is not being “fair” by omitting the fact that the press was navel gazing (if not cheerleading) most of the time their leftist leader O-bomb-ya was in office. Fairness doctrine is authoritarian, polarizing, has many unintended consequences and has no place in a free country. Not that we live in a free country, because we clearly do not thanks to the left – right oligarchy civilian contractors that operate our government and media. Otherwise this article has very salient and accurate points.

  2. Steven K Hovland on Saturday, January 14, 2017 at 12:40 pm

    Hillary’s billion dollar campaign was small change compared to the billions of earned media the media gave Trump.

    Trump was the organ grinder and the media was the monkey that jumped every time he tweeted something.

    It’s possible that after awhile the people’s sense of fairness was offended and that gave him some votes.

    Had they been as smart as they think they are, they would have given him zero coverage and spent all their time telling us how wonderful Hillary was.