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posted by Snow on Thursday December 01 2016, @06:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the head-in-the-sand dept.

Just before the dawn of the Trump administration, journalism in Washington, DC, faces an existential crisis -- but virtually no one in the profession is willing to diagnose it.

Here it is: For the first time, words don't matter. In August, as a guest on MSNBC's Meet the Press Daily, I noted that voters take Donald Trump seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously.

[...] And journalists keep falling for it because they, like politicians, over-value words -- and they are now covering a politician who does not. President-elect Trump still takes the same cavalier approach to verbal description as he would in hawking a condo tower that's yet to be designed. And more than enough voters don't seem to mind. Trump has spent a career interacting with journalists, but as the first president never to serve in the military, the cabinet, or another public office before his election to the White House, he's never been immersed in the word culture that drives political journalism. [...] Most recently, when Trump announced he had chosen South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to be his ambassador to the United Nations, journalists raced to re-tweet a March rant from Trump in which he said the people of South Carolina should be embarrassed by her.

[...] Writing endless columns on this or that flip-flop based on Trump's conflicting rhetoric is wasting the time of the readers and viewers who have decided that's not what matters with this particular President-elect. [...] If the press covers Trump the way it covered prior presidents -- too literally -- it may find its own customers take journalism itself a lot less seriously.

Source: CNN


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 01 2016, @10:47AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday December 01 2016, @10:47AM (#435376) Journal

    "Journalism?" What is that? I have a vague recollection of a time when there were people that checked facts, tried really hard not to inject their personal feelings into it, and called 'bullshit' on everybody. But it's so long ago that anymore I wonder if it was from a former life or a rose-tinted childhood memory.

    Words and facts don't matter when you gloss them or cherry-pick them to support a "narrative." "Narrative" is what those things have become, and this time the American people were the ones who called 'bullshit.'

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    Washington DC delenda est.
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