The Real Reason the Mainstream Media Hates Trump

BY ROGER L SIMON
https://pjmedia.com/
August 9, 2016

In a much talked about August 7 piece—“Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism”—New York Times "mediator" Jim Rutenberg takes the mainstream media out of the closet and publicly declares them in the tank for Trump.

As front page news this is not exactly man bites dog, but he goes further actually to excuse this bias because, after all, Trump is Trump:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

How're you supposed to cover a woman whose family foundation helped Putin corner the uranium market? Oh, never mind. Rutenberg's point is that the barbarian Trump has put those Fourth Estate idealists in a quandary as never before. The poor dears always try to be neutral, but The Donald is just too many bridges too far. They just can't be even-handed anymore. (Please stay clear of your computer screen if you start to sputter.)

But the truth is that—although he can be a loudmouthed blowhard with poor impulse control—Trump is not remotely  what they say he is: a racist, sexist demagogue. In fact, if you bother to look it up, he was more than a decade ahead of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on one of the most "sainted" of all liberal issues—gay marriage.  But don't expect to see that covered by Gutenberg, et al.

The real reason the MSM disdains, even loathes, Trump is that he threatens what I call The Big Wink, which means he threatens them.

Qu'est-ce que c'est The Big Wink?

We saw it writ large during the (media pronounced) highly successful Democratic National Convention—the key topic of which, beside the excoriation of Donald Trump, was the rescue of the middle class, a middle class, no one admitted, that has done surpassingly poorly during the Obama administration. Improving the situation of minorities was also, as always, invoked, even though minorities, particularly blacks, have done even more wretchedly over the last eight years.

Unspoken, not surprisingly, was a truly uncomfortable truth—the people who have done best under the Obama administration are the rich. No one said or did anything for eight years as the labor participation rate declined to new lows and stocks rose to new highs. The rich profited at the expense of the poor (somewhat) and the middle class (a lot). The Democrats have become the secret—or not so secret—party of the rich.

The media are, for the most part, those rich people, the most successful of them ensconced well up into the higher reaches of the one percent. They also are people who like to think good of themselves, that they are "doing good." For the older ones, now in control, this comes from their "fight the power" college days, only now they are the power. How do you resolve such a contradiction? By making morally narcissistic pronouncements  on behalf of the disadvantaged while privately hoping for, even working for, the status quo.

No more perfect candidate of the status quo has ever come along than Hillary Clinton. She personifies the status quo. Nothing will change under Hillary—for the country or the media. It's all downhill from here.

Her lifetime reputation as a serial liar and crony capitalist only amplifies this. It's hard to believe she really means it when she makes such outrageous proposals as her confiscatory capital gains plan that could cause a Depression. Wink, wink, she's a Wall Street girl—and everybody, especially the media, knows it. She won't do anything the slightest bit extreme. 

And they like it that way, even if they don't admit it to themselves. Better for the old 401K and property values in the Meatpacking District. No one really believes Hillary will follow through with those dopey leftwing proposals—not that she has anything else to offer, but that doesn't matter. Nor will she put more than a slight delay in the TPP trade agreement. It's all a Big Wink, designed to fool the Sanders supporters and, of course, the always handy minorities. Power and money are everything.

Donald Trump is a wholly different matter. No one, especially the media, knows what he really intends to do.  The media doesn't like this because if there's one thing they don't like, no matter what they profess, it is change. Or loss of control.

No wonder they don't like Donald and seize on his every miscue or aside as if he were the second coming of Attila bent on overrunning our nation and quite possibly the world. (Compare that to how they shrug their shoulders at Hillary's actual misdeeds.) What they hate most of all is the temerity of the vulgar Queens billionaire in exposing the haute bourgeois lifestyle of the Upper West Side for what it is—fake and self-serving.  The way things look now, they won't let him survive it.

Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His book—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn't Already—is just published by Encounter.  You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can hear an interview about the book with Mark Levin here. You can order the book here.