Donald Trumps Impeachment – Some Uncomfortable Observations About Current Journalism
I have been following the Trump Impeachment for the last few days and after the first two days of listening to the Democratic team deliver their case for impeachment it seemed like a slam dunk in their favour.
I have always been suspect of narratives because they are literary constructs that don't exist in real life. Narratives are designed to influence. Reporters are always talking about narratives.
After listening to Trumps defense team on the third day, I wasn't so sure. They made so good points. Again another fairly good narrative. These are two competing narratives. It is a shame, the outcome was predetermined anyway. Will find out in the next few days.
I found other issues interesting.Canada also found itself in a similar situation.
Think of Canada's constitutional crisis, involving a terror group, kidnapping, bombings,martial law and resulted in the invoking a version of states rights over language, and how it was all driven by media.
The outcome of the impeachment trial,a trial that looks more like an inquiry is predetermined as the jury will vote along party lines. If there is drama, this is where it will be. Some of the jury members consulted with the legal teams. The jury members are subject to intimidation for voting the wrong way. It was pointed out ,no one takes oaths to tell the truth. Made for politics and TV.
So stepping away from the competing and constructed narratives, I have to conclude about the political parties, if you live in glass houses, don't throw stones.
It is all politics, the Democrats are complaining about things they did in past elections regarding the legal vote in federal elections.
Granted the voting process is fraught with controversy from the start.
There is no shortage of hypocrisy in the DNA of the American voting process, so it is especially inherent in southern states a system where not everyone has the ability to vote even though it is an inherent right. The caveat “states rights,” puts the state ahead of the president. Every presidential candidate had to deal with the right of the states when having a presidential election. Even those states had surprising results, in 2016.Times change slowly but they do change.
But, an issue came up during the impeachment ,once again it exposed systemic media bias. This is a cause I have been harping at for years and now it seems so blatant it didn't even cause a ripple nor a reply from television media involved. The bias has been slow and steady, almost impeccable. I hope there will be thesis written by journalism scholars about the whole affair. The rise of white supremacy is the big headline but there is also flying under that wing a rise an equally unhealthy polarization with in media.
The issue of hate rises in media. This is a right and left thing. The balance is shifting. This was something that showed itself in Canadian media during the Stop Harper election several years ago.
I think the CBC recognized the perception of bias when they looked back on it and took some every strong action. The CBC is better for it.
Today in the US, something is growing ever so slowly but seems to have tipped, bias driven by dislike (hate would be a destination very near in the hearts of not only reporters but editorial management and corporate culture, adding ratings and revenue as a driver ) ,if it is not yet dishonest,it certainly is not honest.
It brings me back to when I first started at the Winnipeg Free Press (WFP) in 1979. The WFP was in life and death struggle with the Winnipeg Tribune. There were some strange stories. I had to take a picture of a dog that was being put down because it bit a WFP carrier. Yes, a dog bites person story. The very definition of what news is not. It turns out the story was in retaliation for a WFP truck running over a pedestrian photo in the Trib. The circulation war tipped to “hate.”
The journalism was being bent to satisfy competition between two papers and it got personal. I had to meet the distraught family owners of the dog at the vet. The editor wanted a sad pic of the family with the dog. Thankfully they refused but allowed me to take a head shot of the dog, it ran on the front page. I will never forget how traumatic that was for the family and for me. It was a result of hate between the competitors as a byproduct of competition gone too far. Was it a microcosm of media today?
This trial reminds me about that time. One year later a corporate decision was made to close the Tribune (it was a toss up between the local papers Trib and the WFP) many other competing papers across Canada would also close on that day. THE DEAL would mark the time line of the decline of newspapers in Canada. It was evidence of pettiness and it began an erosion of the public trust. People would see the newspapers differently. This would not be the only case,but a pattern of editorial change.
The Trump impeachment comes down to a gradual and mutual hate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, then Trump and Biden in 2020, but also between CNN and FOX, and Trump and CNN. The hate was personal and it showed. BUT, did the hate between competing news organizations effects the journalism produced. Yes,no, maybe.
I really like CNN and I have only seen a few minutes of FOX news in my life. I just don't have that channel and don't care enough to find it where ever it might be on the internet. I don't spend that much time online anyway. I read current affairs magazines , political biographies, I like TV, I watch CBC, CTV 24 hour news channels and Global National , BBC World News in all its geographical incarnations. I grew up watching the National network nightly news but stopped watching it after Meech Lake. To me one part of the company was competing with the other part to break up Canada and that French / English competition overreached to very nearly accomplishing that very goal. Good fun between the two nationalistic entities , also a weakly reported from a journalistic point of view. CBC has changed for the better over the last few years.
The problem I observed at the impeachment had more to do with the latest trend in clipped or abbreviated TV quotes in news stories. In local stories the reporter relates the story narrative and the quote from a person involved is one or two words, answering the reporters voice over.
In one case,the Trump defense would argue what seemed to be a common mispronunciation of cavalry or Calvary. They would also argue a video glitch where they say a crowd voice was added to say, “lets take the Capitol.” in between Trumps words.
So I am not getting into the defense premise. This quote , I have heard many, many times over many networks, but the last line had always been clipped off. I do remember a news show ,getting a tweet during one program saying the quote was cut short. The tweet was disregarded, but I remember saying to myself , what was that about? The last line is, “I know that everyone here will be marching over to the Capitol Building peacefully, and patriotically make your voice heard.” This line was notably absent over the course of the controversy about Trumps words inciting the crowd over many media broadcasts over many channels. I am guessing it was included on the FOX broadcast. Listeners would hear different quotes ones with and ones without. It would build a case for,if not FAKE news , polarized news, news with an agenda. It would make CNN and other reporters targets at Trump events, I guess. A self inflicted wound putting journalists in danger.
This is not a long quote in seconds, but television routinely clips quotes to a point, it is not given much thought, I guess. Or there is bias to create a narrative and the quote does not fit the narrative. Or something worse. The television audience is constantly reminded since Trump took office that “words matter.” OR, his words matter.
It is not that I am a Trump supporter (Canadian/Manitoban) and I have been posting some of these anomalies since 2016. Donald Trump is an American original an outlier. There seems to be a growing blind spot within the growing categories of political reporting. There is, just as there is in the newspaper business , confusion between editorializing by a columnist and news stories. Bias creeps into both but is usually offset in other stories. Overall it is a wash. Editorializing on a 24 hour news channel means constant messaging over many and most of it's programming hours with many teams of commentators, strategist, annalists ,surrogates and recently monologues by anchors. The amplification has become nearly obscene and now sloppy. Someone smells blood.
Trumps words that were the basis of how very big stories from Charlottesville white supremacy rally in Aug. 2017 were clipped as well as his quote to the rally outside the White House that led to the insurrection.
Clipped to the point of being false reporting, but satisfying a good narrative. The Trump/CNN feud started well before that ,but should that effect the journalism? The clipped quotes where repeated thousands of times on all media. The matching story chain was unstoppable. The dislike for Donald Trump was pretty widely held by 2017. You could not have a conversation about the man without people screaming and talking over one another not only on TV but also on street corners and coffee shops and around family dinner tables. People hated that man to the core and I admit, he is hard to like. Loud ranting commentating ensued, and evolved to speakers who bullied on, not letting anyone on the panel get a word in edge wise. Words/second were machine gun like on so many news channels.
At a rally Trump called for, on the day his vice president would accept the electors from each state, the final election results. This process was supposed to be routine.
Donald Trump would say to the crowd, “after this, I am going to walk down with you.(he did not) We are going to walk down to the Capitol, (repeating) We are going to walk down to the Capitol, and we are going going to cheer on our brave senators and men and women, and we are not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you will never take back our country with weakness, you have to be strong,we have come to demand that congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.
I know that everyone here will be marching over to the Capitol Building peacefully, and patriotically make your voice heard.” This last line was missing on many news casts to the public.
Michelle Obama would famously say, when they go low, we go high,” She would have as good a reason to take the low road as anyone. I am talking about media here,who have always gone high as I have observed in my life in the newspaper business and on US television especially during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, and Canada's private news networks and now the CBC.
When ever they have momentarily faltered, they have fixed their faults. In recent times, media has displayed a band wagon approach encouraging the social injustice, also fallowed by commercial advertising and television dramas and comedies, but also to fuel trends,in dangerous ways because politics has become polarized and news media have also become polarized. Core values are blended like a smoothie to a sweet gooey state. We stand at a cross roads where bias has seeped in and polarization is taking journalism down a dangerous path. Media depends too much on politics, lets see what the rest of Canada ,the rest of world looks like. Maybe it is the cabin fever of Covid -19 and the ether of dangerous infection and politics as spread particles under the skin of journalism. That process also has a filtering mask and now a through the skin entry point.
The second clipped quote that crosses the borderline comes from the Charlottesville white supremacy rally in Aug. 2017.
Donald Trump would say to a crowd, “you also had some very fine people there, on both sides.(interruption) Excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of a very important statue of Robert E. Lee and to rename the park to another name. George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner?
So will he lose his status? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? Like him? Are we going to take down the statute because, he was a major slave owner? Now, we are going to take down his statue? So, you know, That's fine, we are going to change history....”
So the very first line of this quote is often used in another context to connect Trump to white supremacist groups in other stories. People in every story will often say they are taken out of context. Is this one of those cases? Trump was talking about a protest of the taking down of a statue and renaming of a park, gets lost over time as it applies to the violent march and MVC of supremacist killing some counter protesters.
White supremacy is a very sensitive and hurtful subject, but journalists have to hold the line about context and accuracy. It is accurate that he said the first line, but he also said the rest. I think a lot o people wondered about the many statues in many countries. The omission to me is the issue. It is an issue.
During the Black Lives Matters protests and then rioting, media was caught in a ,lets say an philosophical entanglement. Media is trying to support historic and systematic racial injustice.
I was watching the coverage of one of riots and it was noticed that there was an anomaly in the groups. Then reporter offered that the protesters and the rioters were groups within groups. Some protesters,the majority were peaceful but other groups hijacked the protest and caused the violence and burning of buildings. The reporter also said there was another group there and it looked like targeted robberies were taking place at pharmacies for drugs and electronic stores for electronics, as well as food stores for food.
The point I am making that political and racial protests are common enough over decades that there are groups who travel from around the state and out of state to take advantage of the chaos for their own agendas and some of that is criminal, others out of necessity but not really connected to protest. For others it is political.
One person interviewed said the rioting and burning was something that had to be done so that there would be change. It was the experience of past riots that brings urban renewal and attention to racial issues. The burning is a prerequisite. This brings many aspects to simple constitutionally protected protest that media is slow to pic up on, but now the process comes to a head at the Capitol Building Insurrection. Is there a process and agenda being applied to rioting. Yes, I think there is.
This is something to think about , I hope students of journalism take another look. It is all on video and in social media. It is a new thing when it is all blended into a social cocktail as well as polarized news media. Live streaming media reveals agendas that don't fit the pictures they are streaming. It is more complex.
At the Capitol Insurrection ,there were groups within groups, I saw the noise and fury, on the day, but there were other things. The age of the protesters and a few had microphones pushed into their faces and what came out of their mouths was pure brainwashing. How do people in their 50's and 60's get brainwashed? A good question for later. But also a good job by spot reporters.
Another thing, most of the crowd stayed on the steps of the Capitol and didn't go in. Some went in but walked through the hall of statues and large historic paintings like tourists, staying within the roped off pathways,it was surreal. The mob of hardcore insurrectionists were the first in, some in army tactical gear and pack sacks, they did the damage. But there were other peaceful groups , some entered other did not.
But the age is a mystery, Capitol police actually helped some of the elderly protesters go down the steps to leave, surreal. Others posed for selfies. They were criticized,I think they were glad they were not killed and were doing some de-escilattion. I don't know.
Anyway,no excuses. Media does have to recognize how these, now common occurrences of peaceful protest have evolved into systematic violence and criminal theft and likely political manipulation. Peaceful protesters would use the protest to protest legitimate concerns, criminals will use the time to steal, anarchist would cause mayhem, political parties would benefit as Trumps law and order message would cause a shift to his party during the election and cause centrist Biden's party to win , all political calculations based on many things including the Covid-19.
Media need to recognize repeating trends, be smarter and report without bias. Long opinions by Ken Gigliotti to the students of journalism.
PS.Just in the last few minutes.Donald Trump was not impeached, but still could face criminal justice. Seven members of his own party voted against him. Donald Trump may spend the rest of life and treasure defending himself over real offenses he may be accused of.
The insurrection and deaths were on Trumps watch at a rally he called. He threw his own vice president under the bus and put VP Mike Pence's life in danger during insurrection. Trump also tried to over turn a legal election to keep power. He has to live with that and so does his family. It is now world history. News media played a roll by becoming polarized bordering on bias, participating in the hypocrisy, for revenue and ratings. The media spectacle of amplifying 34,000 lying liars,lies, tweeted in five years , with platoons of commentators over a 10 hour periods for each bit of information that had no more that 280 characters at a time, but also misleading the public fallowing a predetermined narrative and clipped quotes to suit it. A sad time for politics, social media and journalism.Maybe the anger of the moment speaking.
Topic: The Trump Impeachment - Some Uncomfortable Observations (Read 1197 times)