Third of four parts.
Re: “Fearsome Forecast: Trump Popular and Re-elected”
Just as President-elect Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media.
In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.
With Mr. Trump’s election, the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived.
Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them.
Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Mr. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.
With Mr. Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Presidentr Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Mr. Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias. He ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America.
Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.
With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Mr. Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president.
Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like President Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to.
Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Mr. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.
(To be continued)
Mr. Gabler’s essay originally appeared at www.billmoyers.com. He is an author of five books and the recipient of two L.A. Times Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today’s biography of the year. He is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC. California, and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
