The intellectual cul de sac of the Bozellian approach is obvious to his media antagonists, but worth reiterating: By focusing obsessively on media bias, you end up creating your own flavors of the stuff. (And libertarians know too well how easily anti-media critics end up becoming pro-state apologists during Republican rule.) Less obvious to my friends in the press is that the critics they despise have a good goddamned point: The media is biased, often ridiculously so, and swimming all day long in a pool of anti-Trump hysteria is enough to drive even some of us Trump-averse types to the borders of anti-anti-land.
If standard-issue journalists and commentators were more interested in persuading those who don’t necessarily agree with them, they’d stop trying to elevate each and every nothingburger Trump story to Defcon 1, and instead be content to follow along the investigative facts being competitively unearthed on a daily basis by the Washington Post, New York Times, and others. And if Fox News wants to reverse its alarming slide into third place, it should find a way to engage usefully with the Trump-generated bombshell of the day, rather than retreat behind media-bias lead stories and #MAGA hashtags.
But old habits die hard, not just in media organizations but among the consumers who take comfort from them. Of all the news items that we could be talking about this week (including, it must be said, acts of violence much more serious than Ben Jacbos getting his glasses broken), do you know what Fox has devoted well over a half-dozen segments to? Katy Perry reacting to the Manchester bombing with the hippy-dippy declaration that, “I think that the greatest thing that we can do is just unite and love on each other and like no barriers, no borders. Like, we all need to just coexist.”
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