Connecting the dots - broken journalism

Published November 25, 2016

by Carter Wrenn, Talking About Politics, November 23, 2016.

After a year of waking up every morning to listen to name-calling and howling on TV I figured, Enough politics – after the election what everyone needed was a break to calm down.

About a week later I read an article about the demise of journalism during the election, thought, Amen – then a couple of days after that I opened a newspaper and read ‘Klan’s Parade Raises Questions about White Supremacists in N.C.’

The newspaper reported that ‘Within 48 hours of the Trump win…the Loyal White Knights of Pelham” had announced a Victory Parade – but had forgotten to say on their website where the parade was. ‘They seem to be working together with neo-Nazi groups,’ a professor from Pittsburgh told the newspaper.

So suddenly we had Klansmen and Neo-Nazis hand in hand at a crossroads near the Virginia border and, of course, the Reverend William Barber of the NAACP couldn’t resist the temptation to blame that development on “the tribe of Trumpism” which led the newspaper to Trump appointee Senator Jeff Sessions who’d once said he found the Klan “OK, until I found out they smoked pot.”

So here’s the picture: Trump’s President. The Klan’s back. And, connecting the dots, the press reports that’s no coincidence.

The election’s over but I’m afraid journalism may not recover.

http://www.talkingaboutpolitics.com

November 25, 2016 at 10:39 am
Richard L Bunce says:

Media engaged in a full-throated #WagtheDog effort...

Classic in the days right after the election was mainstream media using words like misogyny and xenophobe then a few days later reported how the American people were concerned about the Trump transition misogyny and xenophobia because the people were searching the Internet in increased numbers for these words... no clue that it was the medias use of the words in nearly every article about the Trump transition that was triggering the search, not any particular concern about the merits of the media claims.