The mainstream media..

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President-elect Donald Trump's dramatic candidacy catapulted the three cable news networks to their best year ever, with each outlet experiencing record-breaking numbers, according to year-end ratings from Nielsen Media Research. Fox News fared the best in 2016, not only beating its rival cable news networks, but also finishing the year as the most-watched basic cable network — in both primetime and total day — for the first time in its 20-year history.

Trump catapults cable news to best ratings year - Business Insider

No wonder he was treated with kid gloves..

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There we go again, kid gloves..

Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker said his newspaper would not refer to false statements from the Trump administration as “lies,” because doing so would ascribe a “moral intent” to the statements. Baker appeared on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday, where he described some of President-elect Donald Trump’s falsehoods as “questionable” and “challengeable.” But, he said, “I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.” He said reporters should state the facts, but leave classifying them to readers, citing the example of Trump’s claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating on 9/11 (which is false).

Wall Street Journal Editor Says His Newspaper Won't Call Donald Trump's Lies 'Lies' | The Huffington Post

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Here some nuggets from an article quantifying the decline of the mainstream media as Republicans take in a hefty diet of conspiracy theory waging shock jock ultra right wing radio shock jocks, Fox, and the likes of Breitbart. All of these in a concerted effort to delegitimize the mainstream media:

In 2000, Republicans, Democrats and Independents were all within six percentage points of one another in terms of their trust in the media, ranging from 47 percent to 53 percent. But since that time, figures for both Independents and Republicans have been declining, with Republicans generally declining at a sharper rate. And 2016 saw the steepest drop yet for Republicans, sinking all the way to 14 percent. To understand how this might have happened, it’s helpful to look at the evolution of where Republicans have been consuming their news. Examining the initial declines in 2003-04, you see that those drops happen to coincide with two different, but significant and related events — the first being the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the second being the launch of several hyper-conservative long-form talk radio programs in a compressed period. 

Regional hyper-conservative radio personalities took note and quickly stepped in to fill the void. Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck proved to have impeccable timing as they all launched nationally syndicated programs right before, during or after September 2001. Mark Levin soon followed. These political shock-jocks all seized the moment… extending their arms wide open to pull in a large contingent of listeners who were angry and vulnerable in a confusion-filled post-9/11 world. Their audience ratings soared (even as other radio listeners began returning to old habits), and by 2008, those five had joined Rush as the top six talk radio programs in the entire country (for any and all formats, not just political programs).

Besides a pursuit of higher ratings, these six personalities also shared in common a drive to discredit and marginalize standard news reporting. And with a growing, captive audience of tens of millions of listeners, radio proved to be a perfect medium in a post-9/11 setting to deliver this message and codify a malleable audience. Examples of some of the anti-press approaches include: Limbaugh relentlessly led the initial anti-press charge going back to the 1990s, and has often told his followers to actually not follow mainstream media. Savage often refers to the press as “celentrates” (animals without backbone), and recently told his followers, “The media has done far more damage invading the minds of Americans and others around the world than Putin did in invading Crimea.” Ingraham and Levin repeatedly go after the media with claims of dishonesty, with Ingraham even stating the major news networks and papers are “worse than irrelevant.” Hannity, an informal adviser to President Trump, seems to have taken a co-pilot role with the White House in attacking the media with endless claims of dishonesty and being “fake.”



One of the most interesting discoveries in their data is the finding that in 2016, Breitbart.com (a hyper-conservative website previously run by current White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon) had effectively displaced Foxnews.com as the center of gravity for where most on the right side of the political spectrum consumed political information online. Breitbart — which Bannon described during an interview last summer as the “platform for the alt-right” — is beloved by its readers for producing headlines such as “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield.”

As hyper-conservative media surged, Republicans’ trust in news cratered | TechCrunch

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In recent months, both CNN and Fox have retracted stories on their websites regarding particularly high-profile topics on the left and right, respectively. Both sites issued similar excuses: A breakdown in normal editorial standards that led to something being published that shouldn’t have been. Yet in most other ways, the two cases are a study in opposites.

CNN, on one hand, retracted its story within a day and issued an apology. The network immediately carried out an internal investigation. Three employees resigned. Those that remained were told that any future stories on the topic would need to be vetted by two top executives before publishing.

Fox, on the other hand, took a week to retract the story, though it was debunked by other news outlets within hours. Little news of an investigation within the network emerged. No on-air apology was issued, despite a week of speculative coverage on the cable network. No employees resigned. And one of the network’s stars — Sean Hannity — continues to promote the conspiracy theory to this day.

A tale of two networks: How Fox News and CNN handled recent retractions

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Auto censorship..

In 2016 the US elected a president who believes that human-driven global warming is a hoax. It was the hottest year on record, in which the US was hammered by a series of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes. Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been blotted from the public’s mind. 

This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the subject because they have an instinct for avoiding trouble. To talk about climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire political and economic system.

Why are the crucial questions about Hurricane Harvey not being asked? | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

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Why there is no "Democratic" media

But conservative media like Fox and Breitbart don’t succeed because they lie, they succeed because they push an ideological agenda. Their message may be flexible with facts, but is consistent in its overarching vision, as well as with the agenda of the Republican Party. And this works because, as political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins write in their book Asymmetric Politics, the Republican Party is defined by ideology.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are defined by their constituent social groups. Their agenda is to defend the rights and advance the interests of those often historically marginalized groups, and as such will pursue certain specific progressive policy goals. But they lack a holistic ideological approach, a liberal counterpart to the movement conservativism that grounds the Republicans and the media outlets that power that movement. Thus there’s far less appetite among Democrats for the type of unsubtle propaganda that Verrit traffics. One can see it in the way Fox News trounces MSNBC in viewership: Republicans see Fox as the only news source they can trust in media landscape that does not align with their values. Democrats would rather just read the New York Times. 

News outlets serve different purposes for the two parties: as Grossmann and Hopkins write, Republicans “view themselves as engaged in an ideological battle with a hostile liberal establishment, turning even their choice of news source into a conscious act of conservative self-assertion.” Democrats, on the other hand, are happy with “traditional media sources that often implicitly flatter the Democratic worldview but do not portray themselves or their consumers as combatants in a political or ideological conflict.”

Why Verrit, a pro-Clinton media platform, is doomed to fail | Michael Paarlberg | Opinion | The Guardian

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If the mainstream media did their job they would point out that this is a scam..

Republicans are on the verge of passing a $1.5 trillion tax reform bill that would raise taxes for millions of middle-class families and cost 13 million people their health insurance—all to pay for massive corporate and upper-income tax cuts. A tax reform package has already passed the House; the Senate could vote on its bill as soon as Thursday. And yet, despite the fact that this legislation represents an enormous transfer of wealth up the income ladder, and has progressed with a shocking minimum of democratic transparency and accountability, it has not been treated as a massive scandal by the media. 

We’ve been here before. Back in July, when Senate Republicans were attempting to repeal Obamacare, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s chief insight was that the success of the bill depended largely on two factors: speed and stealth. With a news media distracted by an overwhelming number of scandals emanating from the White House, not to mention daily Twitter outbursts from President Donald Trump, McConnell had cover to craft sweeping legislation. And he very nearly succeeded in getting it passed..

The Media Still Doesn’t Know How to Cover a Bankrupt GOP | New Republic