Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Harper's magazine published an article in 2016 detailing how the
Washington Post and other Beltway media cut the throat of the Sanders campaign
in an apparent effort to help Hillary Clinton win the Democratic nomination.
This and other articles went on to show to some degree why and how
Beltway media hobnobs with the power elite in Washington, having more in common
with those they cover then the public they professed to serve and enlighten.
Over the last few years the curtain has been pulled back on The Wizard
of Oz of national media and the concept of objective reporting unmasked. Unbiased
Free Press is a myth and perhaps always has been.
Recently it has become so particularly obvious that media clearly is
merely another political player scrambling to keep its place at the table of power.
Despite what we get taught in journalism school, media is not the
check-and-balance it pretends to be but one of the players and this is even
more so for the elite media that pretends to cover what goes on in Washington
DC.
Beltway reporters aren't divorced from those they cover. They are part
of the same elitist club as the politicians and others we rely on them to cover.
Reporters, editors and publishers go to the same privileged schools, hang out
in the same privileged social scene and befriend even date and many of the
political elite they have to report on every day.
More importantly they are and see themselves as member of the same
power elite and do their best to protect the interests of those they believe
are part of their club.
Politicians like Trump and Sanders scare the hell out of this news elite
because such political figures do not come out of the same batch of the
universities and do not owe the same allegiance to the club as they do.
While you might expect better from those media sources outside the
Beltway, this is also an illusion. Journalism is also a club and those on the
fringes want to be in the inside too and so use insiders as sources for coverage
so they can be seen like they are.
In this way, many local and regional dailies and websites like CNN are
constantly quoting from media such as the Washington Post or the New York Times
so they all have the same message and of course the same perversion of news.
The fact is Beltway journalist do not actually cover news it all they
largely rely on close powerful contacts to feed them with they need to know and
suffer from what it used to be called “official sources syndrome.” This means news isn't news unless someone
important says it is or somehow involves someone important. Since Beltway reporters will not damage priceless
relationships they have with these politicos on the inside, we rarely get anything
from these media outlets except what some Insider wants us to know.
And since these political elites are usually tied to mainstream
political groups who have no use for anybody like Sanders or Trump media tends
to attack them on this elites behalf.
Sanders and Trump come from a whole different Power structure which
does not own any allegiance to old boys and girls network of the Beltway Club.
Worse still, Trump refused to recognize the Washington Post as a legitimate power
player – thus setting the Beltway media
and its wannabes on a collision course and in a conflict of defining what is
real and not real news.
Since then the Washington Post in the New York Times have been out to
get Trump in any way possible, not just out of dislike for Trump, but also to
protect their uncomfortably close relationships with the Washington elite – and
so we see a plethora of generated hate stories Trump calls fake news.
This gives new meaning to the New York Times adage “all the news that's
fit to print” which should read “all the news the New York Times sees as fit to
print as long as it doesn't ruin some
relationship media has with its inside sources and keeps media's place at the
elite power table.