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Looked at from the perspective of conservative voters who feel that they have been repeatedly lied to and abused by media elites for decades, it’s not hard to understand how we ended up with President Trump. The media, however, is so unrepentant and lacking in self-awareness that it is having real trouble admitting it’s done anything wrong, and instead is indulging its worst impulses of hyperbole and hysteria. The fact remains that the current political situation is the logical result of the hostile and distrustful environment it cultivated, rather than some black-swan event unleashed by the sudden onset of irrationality of voters in flyover states. It was the media’s decades-long approach of putting its thumb on the scale by covering conservatives and conservative causes poorly that created a lose-lose situation for conservatives. There was no way for them to operate successfully in a system where the media allowed them to be respected as the principled opposition only as long as they were shackled and limited by biased news coverage. And conservative voters were beyond sick of it. The media would say things that weren’t true, and cover issues dishonestly, and then accuse others of being liars or gaffe-makers for disagreeing. No candidate—not even squeaky-clean moderates like Mitt Romney—would keep the media from painting Republicans and their beliefs as dangerous. It was enough to make half the country give up on the enterprise of working with the media altogether. Most Americans had no way to combat media crimes and their power to shape the culture and electoral outcomes, particularly if they were focused on their work and home life. And even most politicians weren’t quite capable of combating this media power. Along came Trump, the brilliant master of exploiting public opinion. A New York real estate developer and reality TV celebrity, he had spent decades studying the media and how to make it work to his advantage. Understanding that conservatives had lost trust in the credibility of the media to cover politics accurately, the media became one of his primary targets, and he played it like a fiddle. Trump voters loved that he was beating up the bully they had been impotent to vanquish. They loved that he destroyed the media’s power to declare things gaffes, much less campaign-destroying gaffes. Figures such as Chuck Todd can lament Trump’s ability to put the media in its place as being “unAmerican” all he wants. The fact is that Trump wouldn’t have this power had the media not set things up through decades of shoddy coverage targeting its political opponents. The media did this to itself. Trump’s unique power to bring attention to the problems of the media also meant that his 2016 campaign proved a case study in identifying and examining pernicious media trends. Among the trends he identified that are worth exploring are the media’s overwhelming desire to push narratives in spite of its inability to see the future; its undeniable coordination with the Democratic party; its attempts to present opinions as facts, and vice versa; and the blatant double standards in its coverage motivated by partisanship.
