Chap. 26: Taking Back Trump's America Serialization

The Inglorious Never-Trump Media Bastards

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So, with printer's ink, by the barrel, the new comer was cried down."²⁰⁵

John F. Steward, The Reaper, 1931 Boy, the media in this country suck. Don’t they?

Mark Levin, February 17, 2021²⁰⁶

Strategic Failure #5 may well be the most surprising failure that would lead to the Fall of the White House of Trump. This was the chronic and pernicious inability of the White House Communications Team to fight back against the information warfare of the so-called “mainstream media.” This Never-Trump media would run fake news circles around us, thereby dominate each day’s news cycle, and leave the Boss to bellow, howl, and lash out across the Twittersphere on an almost daily basis.

As we explore this Strategic Failure, there is only one rule: No whining. Instead, let’s take it as a given that throughout President Trump’s four years in office, and particularly in the critical months leading up to the November 3, 2020 election, an overwhelming majority of the media were virulently Orangeman Bad anti-Trump and hell-bent on his defeat.

To say, think, or insist otherwise is to simply ignore this critical abiding truth: We have reached a sad, sordid, and very dangerous inflection point in American history where the preponderance of our print and TV journalists are Left-leaning, often rabidly partisan, and absolutely fearless in their “political ends justify the journalistic means” propagandist approach to covering what used to be called the news.

Today, that “news” is, as President Trump has so often charged, often fake news. It is nothing more than propaganda cleverly and deceitfully packaged by earnest, blow-dried, hair-dyed, talking heads who would desperately have you believe they traffic in facts rather than the gutter trash that passes for truth.

All the Fake News Fit Enough to Print

The Oxford Languages dictionary defines propaganda as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”²⁰⁷

The Encyclopedia Britannica, on the other hand, prefers “dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies – to influence public opinion²⁰⁸ while Merriam-Webster cites “ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc.²⁰⁹

My favorite definition of propaganda, however, is this by Oxford Reference: “Persuasive mass communication that filters and frames the issues of the day in a way that strongly favours particular interests…. Also, the intentional manipulation of public opinion through lies, half-truths, and the selective re-telling of history.”210

Now, if collectively these definitions don’t fit the Never-Trump mainstream media, then I don’t know what does.

Just what exactly do I mean when I reference the “mainstream media”? These are the major newspapers, television networks, and cable TV channels from which nearly half of America gets its daily news.²¹¹ And within this mainstream media – let’s call it interchangeably as I have done in this book the “corporate media” – the bulk of the major players generally drive straight down the Left side of the ideological street.

In the print world, the most prominent Big Left Wing Dogs include, by circulation and political influence, the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. As a countervailing force on the Right, you have the second and fourth largest newspapers by circulation, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post along with the fast-charging Epoch Times.

While both the WSJ and Big Apple “Post” are owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Post is far more pro-Trump and Main Street MAGA than its more highfalutin’ Wall Street cousin. By the way, if I had to read only one newspaper in the world, it would be the New York Post, if for no other reason than its incredibly entertaining “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headlines. And the Epoch Times is now a regular part of my daily scan the news routine, particularly for international news.

As for the TV world, the mainstream media’s Big Left Wing Megaphones include – and sadly so – all three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC along with the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). From the golden days of giants like Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and Edward R. Murrow – and legends like Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer – our major networks have descended into a fool’s gold age of Woke Pearl Clutchers.

Of course, this Never-Trump media TV universe also includes two of the top three cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC.

To refer collectively to these Left Wing newspapers and television networks as part of the “mainstream” media is therefore really a misnomer. This media is mainstream only in the sense that it delivers much of its content to Main Street Middle America.

To put this another way, there is nothing really “mainstream” about a relatively small cadre of Left-leaning journalists numbering no more than in the thousands who have little in common with the hundreds of millions of Americans who stand squarely in the political center of this country.

As to where this political center lays across the ideological spectrum, we are for better, and I think not worse, a moderately Right of Center country. And that is the paradox of our times, that Left- leaning media cadres are effectively serving as primary content deliverers for a far more centrist America.

Just how did American journalism wind up in this ideological paradox? The answer begins in a brief microwave history of the precipitous decline of America’s print media in the digital age.