BRILLIANT, BY HANSON – AT 10:08 A.M. ET:  Victor Davis Hanson, one of the finest of conservative historians, has written the best piece by far on what's happened to the American media.  It should be widely quoted.  From the Hoover Institution: 

In the 2008 campaign, reporters ignored the close and disturbing relationships between the mostly unknown Obama and a cast of unsavory characters: his racist and anti-Semitic pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the neighborhood confidant and former terrorist Bill Ayers, and the wheeler-dealer and soon-to-be felon Tony Rezko.

Instead, journalists quickly started worshipping candidate Obama in a manner never quite seen before, not even in the days of the iconic liberal presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas declared Obama to be a deity (“Obama's standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”) His very words were able to make the leg of MSNBC’s Chris Matthew “tingle.” His pants’ crease proved for David Brooks a talisman of his future greatness, along with the fact that the mellifluent Obama “talks like us.”

While a few journalists were aware of their cult-like worship, most were hooked and competed to outdo one another with embarrassing hagiographic praise. Upon election, Obama was summarily declared by one presidential historian and television pundit to the smartest man with the highest IQ ever to have been president.

And...

By the time of 2016 presidential race, the media had lost their credibility as disinterested guardians of objective truth. And while Hillary Clinton in 2016 was no Barack Obama in 2008, reporters still gave her special privileges. CNN talking-head Donna Brazile fed debate questions to the Clinton campaign prior to a Clinton-Sanders televised debate. And the John Podesta Wikileaks trove revealed that a number of marquee reporters were openly colluding with Clinton to defeat Trump.

Once the media crossed the Rubicon of partisanship, there was no turning back. The unchecked ebullience that they had showed for Obama has now been replaced by an undisguised hatred for Donald Trump. Just as journalists saw no negative repercussions in their adoration of Obama, they are now able to denigrate the conservative populist Trump without consequences. Arrogance plays a role: the media feel that they displayed power in getting Obama elected and now they wager that they can also ensure Trump’s defeat, or at least derail his presidency

The liberal Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy issued a report recently showing how the media has established a “new standard” of negativity in presidential reporting. It noted that the aggregate news stories from the first 100 days of the Trump administration were about 80% critical. Some networks such as CNN aired 93% negative coverage of the president.

And...

What caused the media’s Trump meltdown? There were a variety reasons.

Trump represents everything that the media despise: a crude reality-TV billionaire without military or political experience, whose orange skin, combed over dyed blond hair, sharp Queens accent, and confrontational attitude seemed vulgar and crass.

The nexus between beltway politics and the media, often cemented through marriages and familial relationships, recoiled that an outsider like Trump sought not just to overturn the Obama agenda but to do so unapologetically and with the same executive orders that Obama himself had bragged about in his “pen and phone” ultimata to make laws without the help of the Congress.

Moreover, Trump campaigned on an us/them, red-state/blue-state dichotomy. He smashed the proverbial Democratic blue wall—a fact that caused great unease to liberal journalists who sensed that half the country found their coastal progressive culture not just foreign but apparently hypocritical and elitist.

Finally...

If the media became unhinged in the adulatory Obama years through hubris, it might have earned back its respect and professionalism by covering Trump in even-handed fashion. But Nemesis does not work that way: those it destroys, it first makes mad.

COMMENT:  Read the whole piece.  Send it around to literate liberals, both of them.  Hanson lays out a scenario that is frightening.  The press is not doing the job that the First Amendment intended.   How does a free society solve that crucial problem?

July 21,  2017