Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Why the Washington Post hates Trump




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.





email to Al Sullivan

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