Instapundit just linked to something calling itself An open letter to Trump from the Press Corps. I clicked on the link, because I thought it might be a masterpiece of self-parody. It is.
No comments allowed on the open letter itself, but I clicked on the Instapundit comment thread, suspecting that there might be some entertaining and quite well crafted abuse to enjoy. Again, I was not disappointed.
An odd thing about this open letter is that it seems so lacking in the very knowledge which you might expect the “Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review” to know quite a lot about, namely how the technological context of journalism has altered in recent years. He says to Trump: You need us to say nice things about you! You need us to get your messages across! But everything that Trump has said and done since he first got into his stride as a seemingly long-shot candidate has said, right back at them: “No, I don’t.”
It will be interesting to see if Trump’s current anti-social media heckling of his Obama-worshipping media opponents keeps happening. I suspect that he’ll start being more polite to them, but only if and when they start being more polite to him. But that could just be wishful thinking on my part.
More generally, one of the things I notice about effective people, including me at those times in my life when I have been effective, is that effective people often do things that they “can’t” do, but which actually, they can do, and which if they do do will serve their purposes very well. “You can’t do that” actually only means that until now you couldn’t do that. And it often also means: Now that you can do that and now that you are doing it, we want you to stop.
Until recently, no President of the USA could tweet back at his media critics, very quickly and cheaply and easily, without in any way having to beg from them any right to reply to their criticisms, and without irritating anyone else who isn’t interested. Now, the President can. The claim that he shouldn’t, because “proper Presidents don’t behave like that” needs him to be persuaded of this claim. But if ignoring this claim is a major reason for his effectiveness, why would he be persuaded?
The media are reacting like Catholic priests after Martin Luther. Since their (priestly) role is to deliver information packaged with their opinions, they literally cannot stand the disintermediation created by the internet. It calls into question not only their curated ‘facts’ but also devalues the opinions they have bundled together with them.
What drives them even wilder is their complicity in Trump’s primary and presidential campaign success. Had they starved him of publicity oxygen he may have crashed out early. They are now writhing on the guilt that complicity engenders. And he is so much better at the game than they are.
It’s easy to overstate the size of a recent change. Yes, Twitter gives Trump direct access to a lot of voters, but the MSM is still a really big institution, and has a lot of power. Less than it used to, and it’s still on the decline, but still a large absolute amount. Writing it off entirely is a mistake.
Well the Catholic Church survived post Luther. Even though every priestly caste is under pressure from the internet, we will still have lawyers, doctors, estate agents, travel agents, even journalists. There is still a significant market for those who want these functions carried out by someone else.
Still fun to see them squirm.
I think it could simply have said ‘We won’t fawn over you like we have done with the incumbent, and that is how it is going to be going forward.‘.
The obvious question to ask Trump is ‘Given that it was said that George H. W. Bush was said to remind women voters of their first husband, and your election opponent reminds everyone of their first mother-in-law, how did you win?’.
I fully expect to spend the Trump Years rolling my eyes, but I admit I will enjoy the sound of so many heads exploding during the imminent Entrumpening đ
Before telling Trump that the media will defend objective truth from his false statements, the letter (ike Meryl Streep) makes its poster child the fictitious ‘mocking disabled reporter’ charge – one of the least plausible, most easily disprovable, most obviously motivated, of their many accusations against Trump. Then it assures Trump that he will no longer be able to divide the press – they will be united against him – in terms that beg to be summarised as ‘journo-list is (still) operating; mainstream media is indeed just a coordinated pressure group’. The letter promises to embed reporters in government agencies to oppose Trump – and supporters of Trump need only quote that bit as written!
Alsadius (January 18, 2017 at 12:31 pm) is right that the media remains a big institution but if this is really the calibre of its leadership – if they remain this determined to swallow even (especially?) the crudest bits of their own propaganda before offering it to us – then its size will not conceal its weakness, and the letter’s promise to earn back the trust of the public will not be fulfilled.
The scribblers, formerly the king-makers and self-appointed conveyors of truth and justice, are actually going ape because they are beginning, just beginning, to see their relevance in question.
Why? The wrong side, the hated middle-America voter without the leave and guidance of the urban and urbane media has elected a President, a President for God’s sake, not of their choosing. No black and white cookie President, no hard scrabble youth to Harvard Lawyer, no WWII PT-Boat hero, just a plain vanilla real estate executive and businessman in a sequined jacket, Don Trump.
Just to show us how unaware mediaites are of what is going on in their field, Trump is a major media seller. Humor, fights, the unusual not to say unprecedented and unpredictable, always did and always will sell more media than the sob story and the soap opera. ‘Portia Faces Life’ vs ‘Gone with the Wind.’
Also thanks to Instapundit for creating, or maybe popularizing, a new word. “Disintermediation”.
It’s what the internet does and not just for Trump.
Andrew Douglas says :”we will still have lawyers, doctors, estate agents, travel agents, even journalists. There is still a significant market for those who want these functions carried out by someone else.”, to which I say
lawyers-there is now much legal software bypassing them, there will be more and today virtually all legal research is online and can be done by anyone for a small sum
doctors-frequently caught in silliness by their patients who google them senseless. My doctor ruefully admits that he is much, much more careful because he is being google-checked all the time.
estate agents-here in North America we have mls.com and a thousand variants. You want a property in Guadalajara? Google it.
travel agents – air b’n B, VRBO, tripadvisor and every airline of any size has a website and a tie in credit card.
journalists-real ones, good ones, honest ones, yes, but there are so few of them.
It also strikes me that the heart of the reformation was disintermediation – the printing of cheap bibles disintermediated a whole priestly class.
Fred
That is exactly my point. The internet is disintermediating the professions in the same way that Luther disintermediated the church.
However, there are still priests and there will still be professions. They will have to adapt to consumers who have better knowledge and the tools to interact. This is particularly hard for the media, which (arguably) adds the least value, and is used to the communication being one way,
I am not an admirer of Mr Trump.
However, the “mainstream media” are even worse.
They are divided into two groups.
The Frankfurt School of Marxism types – and the (the second group) those who serve the Frankfurt School of Marxism without-even-knowing-they-are-doing-it. A tribute to the insight of the Italian Marxist Gramsci – his stress on the “ideological superstructure” determining the “economic base” (basically turning Classical Marxism on its head) with the permeation of ideas leading to ideological “hegemony” with people in the institutions (such as the media) serving Marxism without-even-knowing-they-are-doing-it.
What a choice – Mr Donald Trump or the “mainstream media”.
As usual – if anyone wishes to send me a cyanide capsule it will be greatfully received.
I agree with what was said about disintermediation above. But this is a case where the media’s problem massively predates the Internet ability to disrupt it.
The rot has been going on for a long time. It’s only in recent years that the technology, or rather the widespread adoption of it, has allowed a large percentage of the population access to ‘unfiltered’ news. That only has to happen a few times per individual on a major story for the penny to drop. Once it has happened you never look at the media the same again. You never go back. Every loss of a customer for the mainstream media is permanent.
I think there’s a lot of issues being conflated at the moment. There’s fake news, lack of faith in experts, and lack of trust in politicians and establishment figures. This is happening all across the political spectrum â apart from the centrist rent-seeking people who are keen as mustard on maintaining the status quo.
I think a lot of these are better explained under the heading of ‘fake certainty’. In everything from economics, social science, social justice through to climate change, energy policy, dietary advice et cetera there is a mistaken confidence, or certainty in the modern world. The idea that we have the ANSWER! As Nicholas Taleb says in, “Skin in the Game” our problems have been that for too long a sizeable section of society has made a very good living telling other people what to do. But that certainty is not matched by predictive accuracy or (most importantly) any penalty for failure.
Until we begin to penalise, financially or otherwise, those who receive income for predictions that have negative financial or moral impacts, we will carry on screwing up.
Trump’s been on a roll since he won the election. He’s basking in the high of winning, in the adulation of millions who were roundly surprised that HE WON! against what was supposed to be the Unbeatable Hillary Machine, and in the wailing and teeth-gnashing of the press-snobs who ridiculed him for so long.
So, this is a fun time to be alive, especially for him.
I’m wondering how long it lasts, and how far he’s going to fall when he starts getting into the day-to-day slog of being President. It’s going to be more boring, there are going to be Republicans pushing back against some of his ideas, and there will be fewer ad hominem aspects to the back-and-forth twitter contests – there will actually be substantive issues that will be raised instead of character attacks from both sides.
I’m curious to see how Trump reacts to the loss of veneration that’s undoubtedly coming. Is his huge ego sufficient to carry him through it, or does he become spiteful and nasty?
If he can transform his new rockstar powers into a broad-based respect (or at least a willingness to let him have his say), he might pull this off and have a noteworthy presidency. If it all degenerates into constant multilateral sniping, the letter-signers above may still win.
The irrelevant lecturing the irreverent. I doubt Trump or his team will take a blind bit of notice.
llater,
llamas
Paul Marks (January 18, 2017 at 3:56 pm): please don’t consider the cyanide capsule, Paul – we’d miss you. I think it was Machiavelli who said that every city has two tendencies – the aristocrats and the plebs – and that all legislation favourable to liberty comes from the conflict between the two. Regardless of any assessment of Trump, the mere conflict between Trump and the media will be far more conducive to liberty than the synergy of Hillary and the media would have been.
bobby b (January 18, 2017 at 5:11 pm), Trump’s cabinet picks appear good. If Trump himself does no more than distract the media from them into ‘constant multilateral sniping’ , they (and so, in the simple way we talk about such things, ‘he’) could still achieve things.
I agree with Alsadius. The MSM remains quite powerful. The drip drip drip of Trump-is-a-Russian agent may appear to be ridiculous to those who have already discovered that the MSM is a pile of poo, but for those who still pay attention to it, the propaganda is quite effective. I have a moderate Republican friend who is really nice and good natured, and magnificently gullible, who believed all the Trump will blow up the world stuff during the election and so voted for Hillary. Now he believes the Russian stuff, because he watches CNN.
Of course sometimes things like Golden-Showergate open a few dozy eyes, and some naifs realise what’s what. But there are still plenty who believe the MSM, and not just partisan Dems. I know lots of British conservative folk who believe the BBC. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time is misunderstood IMHO. The key point is not that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but that you can fool some of the people all of the time.
Trump has, with the help of the MSM itself, managed to persuade 40% of the public that the MSM is fiction. To persuade the next 10% to 15% probably requires toning down his own act, and I’m not sure he’s worked out how to do that. Actual achievements that are hard to deny will probably be necessary.
Stuck Record:
“Until we begin to penalise, financially or otherwise, those who receive income for predictions that have negative financial or moral impacts, we will carry on screwing up.”
A book that I read recently mentioned the scare over the Y2K bug. Lots of IT specialists managed to convince many people that this was a problem and charged them lots of money to fix it. Since those that didn’t bother to have it fixed had no problem with it proves pretty conclusively that a massive fraud was perpetrated but no one was ever brought to book over it.
Just wait until Twitter unverifies him, just before he’s banned on Twitter and YouTube. đ
It’s true the media is still a force to be reckoned with, but I don’t think there’s ever been a candidate who won a US presidential election when the entire media establishment lined up against him.
Y2K may or may not have been a non-problem. Last December 31st’s leap second caused a certain amount of trouble to the computer systems of the world. We will find out in 2038, when the Unix operating system has its own version of Y2K. Lord knows, I made sure my single computer was patched for Y2K and it didn’t give me a bit of trouble. Those poor folk who had many terabytes of data accumulated over decades, being manipulated by legacy mainframe programs that nobody understood anymore, running on emulators — they could have had problems.
That’s the media’s problem these days. They’re running on a very old, and incompletely understood, operating system. And they still haven’t realized it needs updating.
CNN Explains How They’re Winning
Cheers
J.M.H.
CNN explain how they’re whinning.
You sound like you are channeling Dominic Cummings (who BTW has been blogging some very long but thought provoking posts recently – https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/)
If Trump goes protectionist, London can become a tax haven for rational Americans! Just like Saint May threatened to do to Eurotopia. How is the pound doing today? Hope it’s giving critics a rude finger.
Regarding the MSM vs Trump this salon article made a good point:
It is a word that has been used quite a lot since the start of the Internet Age.
Hmm. I read it at cjr.org, but when I tried to reload it just now I got “cjr.org refused to connect”
@Brian Micklethwait wrote in the OP:
I could have this all wrong, of course, but, with the perspective of a Kiwi and an observer of the US from afar, and as someone who is unable to understand American politics or what passes for its “journalism”, I’m not sure that the author necessarily realises that what he/she wrote was “a masterpiece of self-parody”, or even intended it to be.
I suppose it might have been written tongue-in-cheek though, because it really does seem to be rather funny – the sort of thing that one might have seen out of (say) the excellent Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, for example.
The Wikipedia entry for The Columbia Journalism Review seems to indicate that it is some kind of self-styled trade union organ for journalists, irrelevant in the Internet age (having in been disintermediated) and with struggling finances. Maybe this “open letter” is a brave attempt to recover from that and attract membership dues, so good luck to ’em. Who knows? Maybe it will at least garner them a lot of hits.
However, some people (not me, you understand) might say that the Columbia have nailed their thumb to the mast, along with their treatise, and are pissing in the wind, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
I liked the sentence: “We will set higher standards for ourselves than ever before.” That’s a bar so low it’s resting firmly on the ground. Still, it’s a nice aspiration, although given that just a few paragraphs earlier he repeated that thoroughly discredited lie of Trump “ridiculing” a disabled reporter it’s clear he personally doesn’t plan to live up to it.
Laird
Limbo Dancers: setting a low bar and then underperforming.
A four word rebuttal to this press self-fellation was published, too: “We don’t believe you.”