After the shock of President Trump’s November 8, 2016, victory, many leaders in the news business promised a major examination of what went wrong — but from Day One there seemed to be confusion over what was actually meant by “wrong.”
The publisher of the New York Times, which sits atop the American news pyramid, issued a much-discussed quasi-apology that seemed largely a mea culpa for ignoring Trump voters (thus, 774*-and-counting reports from tobacco-spit-stained diners in southern Ohio); remarkably the Paper of Record has never apologized for a) the day shortly before the election when it treated an ultimately inconsequential thing about those damned emails like the Second Coming of Watergate or b) the story also right before the election that falsely claimed the FBI had uncovered no Trump-Russia ties (when it actually had).
Generally, there were vague promises — in line with the media’s post-Trump “Democracy Dies in Darkness” pronouncements — that campaign coverage would be more serious and less hijack-able by trivia once the 2020 race got underway. But that moment has now arrived, and it looks like the same people are covering this presidential election — with the same tired bag of tricks.
The most egregious case, in my opinion, has been the coverage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who wasn’t just the first Democrat to announce for 2020 but so far has been the boldest when it comes to both diagnosing how American got into this jam and prescribing actual solutions. Warren has charged head-on into the loaded-yet-critical issue of income inequality with proposals like a wealth tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires and legislation that would force big corporations to be held accountable.
But is she, you know, “likable”? That was the bizarre question that hung over the first days of the Warren campaign (inspired, presumably, by the notion that 2016 voters rejected a qualified woman because they didn’t like her and you can’t change the voters not matter how misogynistic they are, so you should kowtow to them by changing your candidate) only to be supplanted by the endless controversy over her apparently minor-level DNA of Native American heritage.
https://www.philly.com/opinion/comme...-20190212.html
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