Has the media lost it’s mooring? And, if so, how will it right itself?
Donald Trump and the Rise of Alt-Reality Media
by Charles Sykes
Politico
November 25, 2016
You think the truth took a hit last year? It’s about to get worse. A lot worse.
Earlier this year, I argued that the conservative movement did not merely have a Donald Trump problem””it had a media problem. As Trump slouched toward the nomination he was backed by a conservative media that had successfully created an alternative reality bubble around his candidacy. When Trump claimed that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the attacks on 9/11, for instance, callers to my show lined up to provide supporting evidence the only source of which was an echo chamber of partisan bloggers; listeners chimed in with evidence they had seen on Facebook linking Ted Cruz”™ father to the JFK assassination. Of course, we know the origin of that “evidence” was the National Enquirer. Crowd-sourcing has its limits.
As a #NeverTrumper, I had hoped that the election would prompt a moment of reckoning and introspection, not merely about conservative values but also the role of the conservative media. As someone who has spent much of his career promoting conservative values on my radio show, I was depending on it.
Clearly, that is not going to happen now. In fact, it”™s going to get a lot worse. Read the whole article here.