Trump Has Set the Media’s Hair on Fire
Is the sky finally falling?
“Can Trump be stopped?” Sohrab Ahmari wondered for The New Statesman on January 24, 2024, repeating a question currently dominating practically every news cycle.
“Donald Trump has clinched the New Hampshire primary in the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, as the polls predicted,” noted Ahmari dejectedly. “The New York Times currently projects an 11-point margin to Nikki Haley in second place — tighter than what he achieved in Iowa, to be sure, but still formidable. The result attests to Trump’s enduring grip on the GOP voter base, as well as the disconnect between the desires of rank-and-file Republicans and the party establishment as embodied by Haley.”
“Haley, a former UN ambassador, went into New Hampshire with solid advantages,” Ahmari noticed. “For one thing, the Granite State allows undeclared voters, who make up 40 percent of the state’s electorate, to take part in either party’s primaries.”
In New Hampshire, Haley did indeed perform well with the state’s independent, undecided, and Democratic Party-friendly voters. Less so with the state’s registered Republicans, though Haley outspent Trump by a considerable sum.
“Then there was Haley’s money advantage,” Ahmari admitted. “Her campaign and its allied political action committees (PACs) spent some $30m on broadcast and digital advertising in New Hampshire, nearly double Trump’s ad spend, according to Politico. Haley is also the figure around whom anti-Trump mega-donors have coalesced, including notably Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a committed Democrat, who chipped in $250,000 to a Haley PAC.”
“Trump’s nomination is becoming a horrible inevitability,” whined the LA Times editorial board piteously on January 24, 2024. “Why can’t the GOP do better?”
“Yet the uncomfortable reality is that Trump’s status as a defendant seems not to have chilled the ardor for him among his supporters; the indictments may even have helped his campaign by allowing him to portray himself as a victim,” complained the Times in wonderment. “He also has benefited from the contemptible deference he has received from leading figures in his party and the reluctance of most of his erstwhile Republican rivals to treat him as the threat to democracy that he is.”
Trump isn’t the only subject about which progressive media outlets are having an absolute meltdown, however. A cadre of failing and failed left-leaning news outlets, and the potential replacements of same, is giving media outlets the howling fantods.
“A Newspaper Is Failing, a Conservative Saves It, and Journalists Are Upset,” wrote Brad Slager for Townhall on January 24, 2024.
Slager presented a grim litany only too familiar to beleaguered mainstream newsrooms and their progressive editors: “This week the Los Angeles Times ownership instituted layoffs of over 100 staffers; The Washington Post has experienced another recent staff cut with buyouts of workers; Print and broadcast outlets have been cutting payrolls, to the tune of thousands of jobs lost the past year.”
Even Sports Illustrated recently went belly up.
It seems erstwhile progressive media outlets don’t object to private ownership of a major newspaper; only when conservatives do it.
“It is quite revealing how so many covering the sale of the paper, and the subsequent meeting with the staffers, brought up the Baltimore Banner, and yet not a complaint is to be seen about the owner of that outlet,” noted Slager. “Stewart Bainum is the mirror image of David Smith; he runs a conglomerate (Choice Hotels International), is a billionaire investor, and is a local to the area. He is, however a staunch Democrat. He served in the state legislature and is a heavy party donor.”
“Yet his ownership of a local news outlet is curiously not seen as a problem,” Slager pointed out.
“Billionaires Are Journalism’s False Saviors,” complained Sarah Jones for New York Magazine on January 23, 2024.
“The situation is revelatory,” Jones intoned. “Media layoffs tell us something about an owner’s business prowess, but they also show bigger forces at work. Though companies say layoffs are business decisions, there is an ideology underneath the jargon.”
“Now altruism has worn thin,” complained Jones. “Plain business interests are taking over, and media workers are feeling the blow. The implications for them — and the public — are devastating.”
“In 20 years you truly will not be able to believe anything that you see or hear online — which will be the only place you see or hear things,” wrote Jack Crosbie for Discourse Blog. “Every person trying to learn more about the world around them will be forced to navigate a chaotic ecosystem of rage and deceit in search of one of the few honest or good-faith news providers that still exist.”
That half the country’s consumers of news media already believe this is a sign of how late this call comes — and how empty it sounds. Now, with Trump’s party nomination looking more and more unavoidable, the Democratic Party is increasingly turning to lawfare to kick him off the ballot.
“Trump’s Supreme Court Justices Must Kick Him Off the Ballot,” Yale’s Bruce Ackerman screamed for Politco, before adding, rather threateningly: “It’s their only choice if they want to maintain their commitment to originalism.”
“As the Supreme Court weighs whether to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 elections, it should quickly become apparent to the justices that their own constitutional legitimacy, no less than Trump’s, hangs in the balance,” he threatened.
“By affirming the Colorado decision, the Trump-appointed justices would make it clear that they are not merely rubber-stamps for the president who propelled them through the Senate,” he wrote — using the word “propelled” as if getting Justices confirmed to the Supreme Court via the same method every other president has used were somehow nefarious in this case — “and that, despite prevailing public skepticism about the court, they are reaching out to their fellow justices in an on-going effort to decide hard cases on the basis of fundamental principles.”
If efforts to kick Trump off the ballot fail, what will the next steps be for Democrats and progressive media outlets?
(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)