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The mainstream media are still in shock, but they should be grateful.
Because when Pennsylvania’s electoral votes were called early Wednesday morning to seal the presidential election, it did more than elevate Republican candidate Donald Trump to President-elect Donald Trump.
That call for the Keystone State saved the news media in the United States – and the First Amendment along with it.
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It doesn’t take a conscious conservative to realize that the American media complex had sold its journalistic soul to the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was a logical extension of the embarrassing fawning over Barack Obama in 2008 that led to the eight disastrous years the country has endured since.
For most liberal members of the media – and that’s the vast majority of American newsrooms, whether the medium is print, broadcast or digital – solidifying the legacy of Barack Obama and justifying their own betrayal of professional principles of the past years was the unspoken goal of the 2016 election.
The fact that the Republican candidate was Donald Trump – as incendiary a candidate the country has seen since William Jennings Bryan and his “Cross of Gold” rhetoric – made it that much easier for liberals to tell themselves they were fighting for the good and true and just and beautiful.
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(It doesn’t take much for liberals to believe that anyway – Jay-Z, Beyonce and the harridans on “The View” tell them it constantly.)
But in 2016, it wasn’t even subtle. As has been endlessly repeated by now, the media made its bias as clear as possible – with The New York Times, the so-called “newspaper of record,” declaring on its front page in August that the normal rules of journalism would be suspended because Trump presented such a unique danger to the American Republic.
In that, as in so much else this year, the liberals had it exactly wrong.
The danger to the Republic never came from the Republican candidate. The blessed men of the Constitutional Convention made sure many, many years ago that the powers of the American government would be divided among three co-equal branches of government.
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The real danger came from the mainstream media monolith itself, when it betrayed its own history, and the protections enshrined in the Constitution, to take an active side in a political fight.
ABC News, with former Clinton White House flunky George Stephanopolous as its star anchor, is an easy target, of course. And CNN isn’t called “the Clinton News Network” for nothing — witness the revealed cheating of former CNN contributor Donna Brazile.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and all the usual suspects did their part to hollow out the very independence of the press the Founders envisioned during that summer in Philadelphia 229 years ago.
If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency – and against a “villain” like Donald Trump, no less — the American media would have fallen into line for her again the way they did for Obama for eight years.
The campaign alone proved that. The media attacked Trump with totalitarian unanimity and on every trumped-up charge imaginable – including an out-of-nowhere claim that he molested a woman on an airplane 35 years ago. Clinton, meanwhile, was given a pass on actions that literally endangered the security of the nation she’d been entrusted with.
Her presidency would have been more of the same to the betrayal of the American people and the Constitution. The Washington Post and New York Times nicknames of “Pravda on the Potomac” and “Pravda on the Hudson” would have been more chillingly true than ever.
In America, nothing can destroy the freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment but a press that deliberately chooses the bondage of ideology.
By electing Donald Trump to the presidency, the American people saved a media that had already made that choice and was on the verge of losing its way altogether. The American electorate also saved the First Amendment in the process.
Of course, the media won’t be grateful – and probably won’t even understand the lesson.
In a day-after column for The Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor for The New York Times and chief editor of the Buffalo News, showed just how arrogantly blind the mainstream media are still, after Tuesday’s shocking repudiation by the American voter.
She wrote:
And although we journalists try to portray ourselves as cynical sometimes, or hard-bitten, we can also be idealistic, even naive.
We wanted to believe in a country where decency and civility still mattered, and where someone so crude, spiteful and intemperate could never be elected — because America was better than that.
I can fault journalists for a lot of things, but I can’t fault us for that.
That’s not idealism. That’s self-delusion wrapped up as piety and pride – and it’s utterly pitiful.
Maybe Sullivan can’t fault journalists for being willfully blind, but the people of the United States can, because they deserve a lot better.
Sullivan and her ilk could take a lesson from one Twitter user.
24/7 hatred of Trump from the media for a whole year and a half and he still won handily. People aren’t stupid and I couldn’t be more proud.
— Asa J 🇺🇸 (@asamjulian) November 9, 2016
If the mainstream media ever want to regain the self-respect they threw away in a vain attempt to defeat President-elect Donald J. Trump, they might consider doing the job honestly, reflecting the reality of the country and its government as fairly as possible. The media are still going to hate Trump for the next four years — the bitter on-air reactions on CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN following Trump’s victory show what to expect.
In addition, the media will do everything they can to relive the glory days of Woodward and Bernstein attacking another Republican president.
While attacking out of spite may be crossing the line, certainly holding an administration accountable is the role of the free press the founders envisioned, not the combination of lickspittle hangers-on and protective Praetorian guard the media complex has made of itself in the Age of Obama.
President-elect Donald Trump, and the millions of Americans who voted for him, rescued American media from itself, and they saved the First Amendment in the process… at least, for now.
The media should be saying thanks.
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